Etan Patz

Etan Patz (photo from September 16, 1978)

Etan Patz [ ɛɪtn pæts ] (born October 9, 1972 in New York , NY , USA , † 1979 in New York City) was the son of the New York photographer Stanley K. "Stan" Patz. He disappeared without a trace in his hometown on May 25, 1979 . In May 2012, the police arrested Pedro Hernandez in Camden , New Jersey , after he confessed to killing Etan Patz. He was found guilty of kidnapping and murder in 2017.

Disappearance of Etan Patz 1979

Etan Kalil Patz, son of a Jewish family from New York , lived with his parents, his four years younger brother Ari and his two years older sister Shira in the artist and gallery district of SoHo in southern Manhattan until he died on May 25, 1979 disappeared without a trace on the way from his parents' house to the school bus at the age of 6½. Etan's mother, Julie Patz, had for the first time allowed him to walk the short distance to the school bus by himself. From the fire escape, she watched him go until he had crossed the only intersection that was between the parents' house and the bus stop. Then she returned to the house, convinced that Etan would manage the last 50 meters to the stop alone. When Etan did not return home that afternoon and his mother learned that he had not been to school that day, she immediately notified the police.

A large-scale search that was initiated on the same day was unsuccessful. The following day, Etan's father, Stan Patz , a professional photographer, distributed a picture of his missing son, which in the following weeks was featured on search posters all over New York, but also in national newspapers and on television. Sniffer dogs were also used to find Etan's trail, but all efforts to determine his whereabouts failed. A great media hype developed around the missing person, numerous reports from the population initially kept the police in suspense. But when after two weeks there was still no hot lead to Etan's whereabouts, the search was finally stopped.

Etan's parents didn't move and kept their old phone number, which Etan had memorized, always hoping that one day he would call or come back, but the following years passed without any indication of his fate.

Suspicion of Jose Antonio Ramos in 1982

In 1982, when Jose Antonio Ramos, a 35-year-old street vendor, was arrested by New York police for allegedly trying to lure two boys into a sewer where he had set up a makeshift shelter, things began to move Missing case Etan Patz. When the police asked the accused whether he could say anything about Etan Patz's whereabouts, he denied knowing anything about Etan, but said he knew the woman who regularly met Etan on behalf of the Patz family during a school bus strike had accompanied to school. This was a first lead; Ramos had to be released because there was insufficient evidence to support charges. Again years passed without further knowledge in the Etan Patz case.

In 1985, Federal Prosecutor Stuart GraBois was assigned the Patz case. His boss at the time, Attorney General Rudolph Giuliani , who later became New York City Mayor, asked GraBois to do everything possible to obtain a conviction in the Etan Patz case. When Jose Antonio Ramos, who was serving a 7-year jail sentence in Pennsylvania in 1990 , was re-charged with the sexual harassment of an 8-year-old boy, GraBois was appointed assistant attorney general for the state of Pennsylvania to question Ramos again. Ramos confessed that on the day of Etan's disappearance, he had taken a boy with him to his apartment at the time, whom he later wanted to have recognized as Etan Patz with 90 percent certainty based on the missing persons photos. He met the boy in Washington Square Park , about two blocks from Etan's parents' home, and then took him to his rented apartment in the nearby Lower East Side . There he wanted to seduce the boy sexually. But since he showed no interest in it, he accompanied him after a walk in his quarters to a stop on the New York subway , from where the boy wanted to go to an aunt in Washington Heights , a district in northern Manhattan . There he separated from the boy.

In April 2000, one of Ramos's cellmates said that he had admitted to taking Etan to his apartment and sexually abusing him there. "Etan is dead. There is no corpse and there will never be a corpse," Ramos is said to have told him. "It was too terrible, nobody would represent me," he is reported to have added.

In June 2000, the New York police again searched the basement of the apartment building at 234 East Fourth Street on the Lower East Side , where Ramos had lived in 1979, in the hope of being able to recover DNA traces from Etan Patz, which were in earlier years could not yet be evaluated for technical reasons. But even this new attempt to find evidence remained without usable results.

Judicial death determination in 2001

In November 2000, Stan Patz signed the application for an official declaration of death from Etan in court. Since Etan's mother Julie found it even more difficult to take this painful step and, for her part, did not follow her son's application for a declaration of death, the application only became legally valid after a statutory objection period, which ultimately led to the official death declaration only being made on June 19, 2001. This official act opened the way to a lawsuit for damages for unlawful homicide, which was upheld in 2002.

In 2004, Ramos was finally found responsible for the death of Etan Patz in the civil process by the competent court and sentenced to pay USD 2 million in damages because he refused under oath to answer several questions of the court regarding his possible involvement in an alleged homicide from Etan Patz to comment. By taking this step, Etan's parents wanted to prevent Ramos from capitalizing on the story.

To this day, Ramos could not be held criminally responsible for Etan's death.

Resumption of the case in 2010

The New York County District Attorney's Office, under District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr., reopened the Etan Patz case in May 2010. In April 2012, investigators examined the basement of a building near the site of the disappearance. Shortly before Etan's disappearance, the building was used by craftsman Othniel Miller, who, according to witness reports, had contact with the boy. However, no evidence of any involvement in Miller could be found. Instead, an old lead opened up again when the craftsman Pedro Hernandez, a possible suspect as early as 1979, got involved in contradictions.

Pedro Hernandez was arrested in 2012 and sentenced in 2017

On May 24, 2012, police arrested Pedro Hernandez from Camden, New Jersey, after he had stated during interrogation that Etan Patz was first lured with lemonade, then strangled and then put in a carton with piles of street garbage. Hernandez's statement was also viewed critically. His defense attorney pointed out that his client has an IQ of 70 - on the verge of intellectual disability. An in-depth investigation into the alleged murder scene, a basement in SoHo , did not reveal any traces. Proceedings were opened on January 5, 2015, but were discontinued on May 8, 2015 because the jury, with a ratio of 11 for against 1 against, could not agree on a guilty verdict. Etan Patz's father stated that he was convinced of Hernandez's guilt and did not understand why he was not convicted after an admission of guilt. After a new trial, Hernandez was found guilty of kidnapping and murder in February 2017.

Missing Children's Day

In 1983, Ronald Reagan declared May 25th by law to be the official national memorial day for missing children, commemorating the day of Etan Patz's disappearance .

Movie

The producer Stanley Jaffe, who had already directed the production of the successful family drama Kramer versus Kramer in 1979 , directed his feature film Without a Trace (German title: One Morning in May ) about the disappearance of a 6-year-old boy from Brooklyn based on the novel in 1983 "Still Missing" by the writer Beth Gutcheon. Beth Gutcheon, who also wrote the script, was a neighbor and confidante of the Patz family. The publication of her book was followed by allegations of allegedly processing information in her story that she had received from Julie Patz in the closest trust, and of having enriched herself with the misfortune of the Patz family. From Stanley Jaffe's point of view, however, there is no concrete connection between Etan Patz and the purely fictional plot of his feature film. With a happy ending to the film and its literary basis, Stan and Julie Patz reportedly worried that the public might succumb to the false belief that their son had reappeared. Stan and Julie Patz have always emphasized that these questions are secondary to them, that they continue to have a good relationship with Beth Gutcheon and that their only concern is to clarify the fate of their son.

literature

• Beth Gutcheon: Still Missing . GP Putnam's Sons, 1981; Harper Perennial, 1996.
• John Douglas: The Abduction of Etan Patz: The True Story of the Crime That Ended the Age of Innocence . Simon and Schuster, 2004.

Web links

• Man found guilty of the murder of Etan Patz spiegel.de, February 14, 2017

Individual evidence

1. ↑ William K. Rashbaum and Joseph Goldstein: Man Claims He Strangled Patz and Put Body in Box, Police Say. In: New York Times. May 24, 2012, accessed May 24, 2012 . 
2. ↑ ^{a b} Rick Rojas: Pedro Hernandez Found Guilty of Kidnapping and Killing Etan Patz in 1979. New York Times , February 14 2017th
3. ↑ Mark Pitzke: New trace in the case of the small Etan. April 20, 2012. Retrieved April 22, 2012 . 
4. ↑ Uwe Schmitt: Was Etan Patz lured to his death with lemonade? In: The world . May 25, 2012, Retrieved May 25, 2012 . 
5. ↑ Jurors in Etan Patz Case Fall One Vote Shy of a Conviction. The New York Times, May 8, 2015, accessed May 25, 2015 . 
6. ↑ Without a Trace in the Internet Movie Database (English)