Mom recounts horror of murdered boy’s 1979 disappearance
Julie Patz, whose son Etan vanished on his way to school in 1979, testified about the “total horror” of hearing that her son was missing.
|||New York - When her 6-year-old son was late getting home from school, his mother called a classmate's mom and got the news that would launch one of the nation's most infamous missing-child cases.
Etan Patz had never made it to school that day in May 1979.
“Total horror and panic” washed over his mother, Julie Patz, who recalled the moment Friday as she testified against a man charged with killing her first-grader. “My legs started giving out. I had difficulty breathing.”
It is a day she has explained over and over, first during the fevered search for Etan and then as an advocate who pressed in the 1980s for changes in how American law enforcement handles missing-children cases. It's a day she recounted during suspect Pedro Hernandez's first trial, which she could not endure watching after she testified and which ultimately ended in a jury deadlock.
And on Friday, Julie Patz relived her son's disappearance one more time, telling jurors about the fateful morning she gave into his pleas to walk himself to his school bus stop for the first time.
“In that day, in that place, children had a lot more freedom and responsibility,” she said. “And it was considered a safe neighborhood.”
With Etan's 2-year-old brother and a 2-year-old friend running around the family's apartment in the then-artsy-industrial SoHo section of Manhattan, his 8-year-old sister dragging her feet about getting ready for school and children due shortly for in-home day care at the Patzes' apartment, Julie Patz walked Etan downstairs and watched him walk a block and look both ways before crossing the street. Then she turned and went back up.
“Mrs. Patz, is that the last time you've seen or spoken to your son?” Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Joan Illuzzi asked her.
“Yes,” she said.
Nearly 35 years later, Hernandez - who had worked at a corner store by the bus stop - told authorities he lured Etan into the store basement by promising him a soda, then choked him. Hernandez's defense says the 55-year-old Maple Shade, New Jersey, man confessed falsely because he's mentally ill.
Etan was one of the first missing children pictured on a milk carton, and the May 25 anniversary of his disappearance became National Missing Children's Day.
Associated Press