NY prosecutors to retry suspect in 1979 disappearance of Jewish boy Etan Patz

By Luke Tress

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26 November 2025, 12:37 am

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Luke Tress is The Times of Israel's New York correspondent.

This May 28, 2012 file photo shows a newspaper with a photograph of Etan Patz at a makeshift memorial in the SoHo neighborhood of New York where Patz lived before his disappearance on May 25, 1979. (AP/Mark Lennihan)

The Manhattan District Attorney’s office says it will retry a suspect in the case of Etan Patz, a 6-year-old Jewish boy who as kidnapped and murdered in 1979.

The suspect, Pedro Hernandez, was convicted in 2017, but his conviction was overturned earlier this year when a court of appeals said the jury had received improper instructions.

The conviction was Hernandez’s second trial in the case.

The Manhattan District Attorney’s office had been given a December 1 deadline to make a determination about retrying Hernandez.

The district attorney’s office says in a letter to the court that, “The District Attorney has determined that the available, admissible evidence supports prosecuting defendant on the charges of Murder in the Second Degree and
Kidnapping in the First Degree in this matter, and the People are prepared to proceed.”

Patz went missing in May 1979 on the first day that he was allowed by his mother to walk alone to his school bus stop in New York City. He was one of the first missing children whose picture was placed on milk cartons to seek the public’s help in finding him. Despite extensive searches, he was never found.

Another man who was declared responsible for Patz’s disappearance in a civil court was released in 2012 after Hernandez was charged with Patz’s murder.