At the start of the trial, just over three months ago, a Manhattan prosecutor offered a vision of what New York City was like in 1979. Neighborhoods felt like small towns, she said, and children had more independence. They could walk to school, play in the streets and stop in a corner store for a snack, all without parents hovering over them.
Then something changed: On May 25, the Friday before Memorial Day that year, Etan Patz, 6, vanished as he walked alone for the first time to his school bus stop in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan.
“It’s a cautionary tale,” the prosecutor, Joan Illuzzi, told jurors in her opening statements in October. “It was Etan who will forever symbolize the loss of that innocence.”
The man standing trial for murder in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, who at the time of Etan’s disappearance was 18 years old and a stock clerk at a SoHo bodega, was the one responsible for puncturing that sense of security, she argued. The man, Pedro Hernandez, lured Etan into the bodega’s basement with the promise of a soda, she said, and strangled him.
In the weeks since, as the prosecution and the defense have sketched out conflicting portraits of Mr. Hernandez, jurors have heard the testimony of police detectives, psychiatrists, Etan’s mother and his childhood friends, and relatives and acquaintances of Mr. Hernandez, as well as recordings of Mr. Hernandez himself.
In the prosecution’s telling, Mr. Hernandez had a temper that made him volatile and an overwhelming sense of guilt that led him to repeatedly confess — to a prayer group, to his former wife and, decades later, to the authorities. His lawyers, however, described Mr. Hernandez as having limited intelligence and a personality disorder that caused him to admit to a crime he had not committed.
This week, with closing arguments set to begin on Monday, the dueling depictions of Mr. Hernandez and what might have happened to Etan will be pitted against each other once again before a jury weighs Mr. Hernandez’s fate for the second time.
His first trial ended in 2015 when Justice Maxwell Wiley declared a mistrial after the jury reported being deadlocked after 18 days of deliberation. A lone juror held out against convicting him.
Mr. Hernandez, now 56, was arrested in 2012 after his brother-in-law reported his suspicions to the authorities.
Etan’s remains were never recovered, leaving investigators without scientific evidence from crime scenes. Because of that, much of the prosecution’s case has centered on Mr. Hernandez’s own words, recorded in video interviews with the authorities and repeated in the testimony by people who had heard his admissions over the years.
A member of his prayer group said Mr. Hernandez had once fallen to his knees in tears, seeking to unburden himself, saying he had killed a child in New York City. His former wife testified that he had sat her down before they married and confessed.
But there were differences in the various accounts: A childhood friend said Mr. Hernandez had told him that the child was black, and his former wife remembered his saying he had attacked a “muchacho,” which she inferred to mean a teenage boy.
Hours into an interrogation by detectives, most of which was not recorded, Mr. Hernandez said he had choked a boy after luring him into the basement, even imitating the sound he remembered the child made as he strangled him. He said he had placed the boy’s body in a bag and then in a box, which he left with garbage nearby. But Mr. Hernandez said he had believed the child was still alive.
“I felt like something just took over me,” he said at one point.
Mr. Hernandez’s lawyers contend his recollections were based on a fantasy concocted as a result of mental illness. In contrast with the prosecution’s depiction of him as a mercurial and controlling figure, the defense sought to show Mr. Hernandez, who sat stoically through the trial, as docile and suggestible, especially after hours of interrogation.
Mental health experts for the defense have testified that Mr. Hernandez showed signs of schizotypal personality disorder, which can include symptoms like severe social anxiety and paranoia. His youngest daughter, Becky, recounted hearing him describe his visions of demons and an angelic “lady in white,” and seeing him watering a dead tree branch. She said it was “just my dad.”
Harvey Fishbein, the lead defense lawyer, described Mr. Hernandez as “inconsistent and unreliable,” and as "the only witness against himself.”
The defense has also raised the possibility that Jose Ramos, the convicted child molester who had long been considered by investigators as a suspect, could have been responsible. Prosecutors have countered that evidence did not indicate Mr. Ramos was involved.
In recent weeks, prosecutors called a number of witnesses to further rebut the defense. A girlfriend from Mr. Hernandez’s youth recalled reuniting with him as an adult and seeing him punch a radio in a flash of anger. A younger co-worker at the dress factory where Mr. Hernandez had worked testified that he had never found Mr. Hernandez to be mentally disabled, and that in fact the defendant had often given him good advice about life and family, and also on how to check his credit score. And other mental health experts said they believed he could be feigning his symptoms.
One of the experts, Dr. Michael Welner, a forensic psychiatrist, said this month that he had interviewed Mr. Hernandez for over 16 hours. He said he found Mr. Hernandez to be engaged throughout and “moored in reality.”
Dr. Welner said it seemed most likely that Mr. Hernandez had confessed voluntarily to investigators. He was also capable of feeling guilt, Dr. Welner said, and had initiated the confessions he had made to others over the years. He noted in particular the admissions Mr. Hernandez made to members of a church group soon after Etan’s disappearance.
“He said that he felt relief,” Dr. Welner said, “because he felt that he had been forgiven by God.”
Original article here.
