The confession came in a soft, unwavering tone. He recalled when he first spotted the boy, standing on the sidewalk outside a bodega where he worked at West Broadway and Prince Street in SoHo.
The man told investigators that he enticed the boy with an offer of a soda, and then opened up a gate in the sidewalk and led the boy, Etan Patz, down into a cellar.
'When he went in front of me I grabbed him by the neck and I started to choke him,' the man, Pedro Hernandez, told the investigators. 'I wanted to let go but I just couldn't.'
It was 2 a.m. on May 24, 2012, nearly 33 years to the day that Etan, who was 6 at the time, vanished on his way to school. His disappearance and presumed murder haunted New York City for decades, and forever changed perceptions across the country about how closely children should be watched.
For about three and a half hours, in a small room on the ninth floor of 100 Centre Street in Manhattan, Mr. Hernandez calmly admitted to a crime never solved but never forgotten.
'It was like something took over me,' he said. 'Something just took over me and I just choked him.'
In the videotaped statement, which was made public for the first time at a hearing in State Supreme Court in Manhattan on Monday, Mr. Hernandez, now 53, said the boy collapsed and was unconscious.
'He wasn't dead,' he said. 'He was just gasping.' Mr. Hernandez said he stuffed Etan into a garbage bag, 'even though he was still alive,' then put him in a cardboard box. He tossed the child's book bag behind a large walk-in freezer.
Mr. Hernandez hoisted the box on his shoulder and carried it a block and a half away and left it in a doorway in an alley. When he went back the next day, the box had been moved, he said.
The hearing before Justice Maxwell Wiley is being held to determine if Mr. Hernandez's confessions should be thrown out before the case goes to trial. The matter is crucial to the prosecution, since there is no known physical evidence linking Mr. Hernandez to the crime.
Mr. Hernandez's lawyer, Harvey Fishbein, told the court his client, who has a low IQ and a history of mental illness, gave a false confession to investigators in New York.
He said Mr. Hernandez is so suggestible because of his intellectual disability and mental problems that he became convinced - especially following an initial interrogation in Camden, N.J., that lasted nearly eight hours - that he had killed Etan Patz.
'There is no question that when the detectives were finished with my client in the morning of May 23, my client believed what he was saying to the police was true,' Mr. Fishbein said. 'The issue is, was it reliable?'
Justice Wiley must decide if Mr. Hernandez understood his right to remain silent and was intelligent enough to waive it. He must also rule on whether the confessions - Mr. Hernandez made at least three videotaped statements - were voluntary or coerced by the police.
Mr. Hernandez's lawyer has argued his client's statements to the police were false.
But the office of Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, has concluded the confessions are credible and not the results of delusions or police coercion.
Etan disappeared while walking to a bus stop in SoHo on May 25, 1979, scandalizing the city. His body was never recovered; the authorities pronounced him dead in 2001.
Mr. Hernandez, who was 18, worked as a clerk in a bodega near the place Etan was last seen. He was not a suspect during the intensive investigation that followed the boy's disappearance.
But in the early 1980s, he made statements to his former wife and to friends about killing a boy. Those statements were reported to the police 33 years later, when the case again surfaced in the news after the police dug up a basement in SoHo looking for Etan's body.
On May 23, 2012, detectives picked up Mr. Hernandez at his home in Maple Shade, N.J., and took him to the office of the Camden County prosecutor, according to court papers. They began interviewing him shortly after 8 a.m., and he confessed about five hours later, according to the assistant prosecutor in charge of the case, Joan Illuzi-Orbon.
Ms. Illuzi-Orbon said on Monday that Mr. Hernandez volunteered that he had killed Etan after detectives purposely led his former wife and a childhood friend past the open door of the interview room. The police had a tip that he had told both of them about the crime in the early 1980s, she said.
'The defendant finally gave us the information that he had been holding for so long,' Ms. Illuzi-Orbon said.
He would later escort detectives to SoHo to show where he had left the box with Etan inside, a tour captured on a police lieutenant's cellphone, Ms. Illuzi-Orbon said.
Posted by Unknown on Monday, September 15, 2014 - Rating: 4.5
0 comments "In Taped Confession in Etan Patz Case: 'Something Just Took Over Me'"
Post a Comment