Pedro Hernandez Found Guilty of Kidnapping and Killing Etan Patz in 1979 -<br />Pedro Hernandez, a former bodega stock clerk who confessed to luring 6-year-old Etan Patz into a basement and attacking him, was found guilty on Tuesday of murder and kidnapping, a long-awaited step toward closure in a case<br />that bedeviled investigators for decades and changed forever the way parents watched over their children.<br />“I’m really grateful — I’m really grateful — this jury finally came back with what I’ve known for a long time,”<br />he added, “that this man, Pedro Hernandez, is guilty of doing something really terrible so many years ago.”<br />The outcome was a victory for the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr.,<br />who chose to prosecute Mr. Hernandez a second time after the earlier mistrial.<br />“The Patz family has waited a long time, but we finally found some measure of justice for our wonderful little boy Etan,” said<br />Mr. Patz, who sat through every day of the trial, carrying his own cushion to use on the courtroom’s hard wooden benches.<br />To support that argument, the prosecution called witnesses who testified about admissions Mr.<br />Hernandez made over the years, with varying details, about killing a child in New York City.<br />Prosecutors said that soon after Etan disappeared, possibly within days, Mr. Hernandez<br />returned to New Jersey, at some point taking a job at a dress factory.<br />He said he planned to appeal, saying the grounds to do so were “too lengthy to start to list right here.”<br />“We’re confident we’ll be back here some day,” Mr. Fishbein said.
