Etan Patz's Case Haunted New York. It's Still Not Over.

New York Times

7 hours ago

Good morning. It's Wednesday. Today we'll take a closer look at the appellate court decision that put the case of Etan Patz back in the spotlight, 46 years after he disappeared. We'll also get details on why telephone calls from inmates in New York's state prisons will soon be free.
The 51 pages of the appellate court decision that put the Etan Patz case back in the spotlight are dry and legalistic, as appellate court decisions usually are. The judges made no mention of the fact that, as a former assistant district attorney put it after the decision was released on Monday, the Patz case was 'a watershed moment, almost a loss-of-innocence moment for the city.'
The court overturned the conviction of Pedro Hernandez, who worked at a bodega near where Etan's school bus stopped every morning. The trial, in 2017, was his second; the jury in his first, in 2015, had deadlocked.
The guilty verdict was not followed by a collective sigh of relief — perhaps because so much time had passed, perhaps it did not return things to the way they had been before Etan vanished, perhaps because it did not provide meaningful closure to a case that had haunted New York for so long.
The year Etan disappeared, 1979, was a long time ago. As my colleague Michael Wilson noted, Etan, a first grader then, would be 52 years old now. New York has lived under six mayors and the nation under eight presidents since he disappeared.
For New Yorkers who lived in the city in 1979, there is no forgetting the Patz case, and for those who have grown up since Etan disappeared, there is no escaping how their lives were shaped when a boy finally got a 'yes' to a question many children ask and ask again.
The question was, Could he walk to the bus stop by himself? Was he old enough, big enough, city-savvy enough?
The city was rougher then. There were 1,700 homicides in 1979, or an average of 4.75 a day. Last year, there were 377.
'The whole city was rethinking, really, what it had begun to assume about neighborhoods,' said Louise Mirrer, the president of New York Historical. 'The main event for parents at the time,' she added, was that those who had decided that the city was a place where they could bring up their children — 'and where they didn't have to worry about them all the time' — were 'shaken.'
People wanted to believe that they could still trust their neighbors, Mirrer said. Not just the people across the hall or downstairs in your own building, but the people a child would pass on the way to a bus stop a couple of blocks away.
The professor and author Jonathan Haidt told my colleague Michael Wilson that Etan's disappearance and the death of Adam Walsh, a 6-year-old who was abducted and killed in Florida two years later, had 'changed the way we raise kids' in a way that was 'very damaging to human development.'
Over the years, there were reminders that kept the case in the public's mind. In 1985, an electronic screen at Broadway and 47th Street showed a photograph of Etan twice an hour. 'Last seen 5-25-79,' the caption said. 'Still missing.' It is possible to forget that the bodega where Hernandez worked was a seedy place, as one man in the neighborhood said in a story I wrote in 2012. He said that you sensed 'a distinctly hostile feeling' as soon as you walked in. The word on the street was that cockfighting went on in the basement, he said.
Hernandez later moved to South Jersey and was living there when, the appeals court said, his brother-in-law 'called police with a tip about rumors that Hernandez was involved in the disappearance of Patz.' Until that moment, the appellate ruling said, 'Hernandez's life was quiet and arrest-free,' although Judge Guido Calabresi, writing for the court, noted that Hernandez 'had a documented history of mental illnesses.' Calabresi also wrote that Hernandez has a low IQ.
The appeals court said the trial judge's answer to a jury note during the deliberations in 2017 had been 'clearly wrong' and 'manifestly prejudicial.' Hernandez has been serving a sentence of 25 years to life in prison. It is now up to the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, to decide whether to try him again.
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State prisoners' phone calls will soon be free
People incarcerated in state prisons in New York are allowed three free calls a week, each lasting no more than 15 minutes. Each call beyond those three costs 2.4 cents a minute to numbers in the United States and territories like Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Starting next month, all of the calls will be free. Five other states and New York City already have similar policies.
The change in New York State comes after negotiations between the state agency that runs the prisons, the Department of Corrections and Community Services, and the company that provides its telephone service, Securus Technologies. The state will pay Securus 1.5 cents a minute for each call, which the department described as one of the lowest rates in the country.
The change will ease the financial burden for inmates' families and friends. Bianca Tylek, the executive director of Worth Rises, an advocacy group that seeks to dismantle the prison industry, said that New York families spend more than $13 million each year contacting their loved ones behind bars. The costs fall disproportionately on Black and brown women, according to the group.
'It's a win-win for everyone,' Ms. Tylek said. 'For families, incarcerated people, correctional officers and public safety.'
METROPOLITAN diary
Supermoon
Dear Diary:
I was walking down a street on the Upper East Side one fall weeknight, lost in some personal problem, when I heard a voice shout, 'Stop!'
The voice, it turned out, belonged to a small, older woman in a maroon coat.
'Back up and look up,' she said.
I did as I was told.
The several steps back I took brought me out from under an awning so that suddenly I could see the moon, big and brilliant, hanging over the street. I hadn't noticed just how bright a night it was.
'It's a supermoon,' the woman said. 'I heard about it on the radio. NPR. I just had to come out and see it.'
'And,' she continued, pointing the pint container in her hand heavenward, 'why wouldn't I get myself some ice cream, too?'
'It's wonderful,' I said, and we stood right there, listening to the happy clatter from a nearby Italian restaurant and admiring the supermoon together.
— Sarah Skinner
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
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Francis Mateo and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [e-mail].
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