BY DENNIS LYNCH | The lead defense attorney for Pedro Hernandez, the man accused of kidnapping and murdering Etan Patz in 1979, hopes his client’s trial will wrap up by the end of this month. Attorney Harvey Fishbein said so early last week, before his team rested its case earlier than expected.
The defense team chose not to call to the stand three witnesses who testified in Hernandez’s previous court case, which ended last year in a mistrial. Two of them were jailhouse informants whose testimonies supported the defense’s argument that longtime suspect and convicted child molester Jose Antonio Ramos was responsible for the young Patz’s disappearance.
The other witness was a former F.B.I. agent, part of the ongoing investigation in the early 1990s into Patz’s disappearance. She said that Ramos admitted to her that he could have molested Patz and sent him on an uptown subway train the day the boy went missing. The move surprised prosecutors, who had planned to ask the ex-agent about the testimony of the defense’s other two previous witnesses.
Hernandez, now 55, was a grocery clerk in Patz’s Soho neighborhood at the time of the child’s disappearance. He confessed to police in 2012 to kidnapping and strangling the 6-year-old on a May morning before Etan could board his school bus. But the defense has argued it was a false confession, partially due to the defendant’s low IQ and his mental issues — they say he hallucinates.
Patz’s parents long believed Ramos was responsible for their son’s disappearance, but changed their minds during Hernandez’s first trial. Ramos had a relationship with a woman, Susan Harrington, who walked the neighborhood kids, including Etan, home from the bus at the time of the boy’s disappearance.
“Last year, at the end of the first trial, I made my views very clear — Hernandez is guilty beyond any reasonable doubt,” Stan Patz told The Villager this September, at the start of the new trial. “After almost 38 years, my family and I will be glad when it is over.”
The second trial started about three-and-a-half months ago.
Etan was declared dead in 2001 and a judge found Ramos legally responsible for his death in a civil case three years later. Last August, however, Judge Joan Kenney reversed the $2.7 million civil ruling. Stanley and Julia Patz had requested for the ruling against Ramos to be reversed, feeling it would help the case against Hernandez.
