He couldn’t bear to look at Etan’s picture.
When the man arrested for the 1979 kidnap and murder of 6-year-old Etan Patz was confronted with the boy’s haunting missing person’s poster he turned his body away and averted his eyes, a detective testified Thursday before becoming overcome with emotion on the stand as he recalled the suspect’s chilling confession to him.
“I put it on the table in front of Det. Morales and he takes the poster and turns it around and faces it toward Mr. Hernandez,” Det. David Ramirez, who was assigned in 2010 to the long-unsolved Patz case, said of confessed Patz killer Pedro Hernandez.
“At first it didn’t appear that he wanted to even look at the poster, he…turned to the left and then just kind of gazed at it…He said he never saw that child before, never saw that poster before.”
It was an unusual denial considering the ubiquitous posters of the blue-eyed blond in an orange-collared pajama top were plastered all over the city — and had long become an icon for missing children.
A flyer distributed by the New York Police Department of Etan Patz, who vanished in New York on May 25, 1979.Photo: AP
A tip from a family member led investigators to former Soho Bodega worker Hernandez, 53, who confessed hours later during the interrogation in Camden, New Jersey on May 23, 2012.
Ramirez took the stand Thursday in Manhattan Supreme Court before Justice Maxwell Wiley at a hearing to determine whether Hernandez’s confession can be used at trial.
The grizzled detective had trouble keeping his composure as he described Hernandez’s account of little Etan’s fate.
“I’m so sorry, it shouldn’t have happened. I did it,” Ramirez recalled him saying. “He went on to say about how he had asked him for soda, went down to the basement stood behind him and choked him. He actually made the movements like he was choking him and said the boy went limp.”
The hulking detective’s eyes welled and he asked for a moment as he fought back his tears in the otherwise silent courtroom.
“He [Hernandez] was crying, he was weeping, we were all taken aback by it,” Ramirez continued. “He was saying he was sorry.”
That initial confession wasn’t captured on tape because authorities mistakenly thought the cameras were on. They realized their error just as they were reading Hernandez his rights but recorded his second telling of the crime.
Assistant District Attorney Joan Illuzzi-Orbon played that video, showing Hernandez weeping as he described strangling Patz in the bodega basement, stuffing his gasping-for-air body in a plastic bag and placing it into a cardboard box that he said he left on a street corner blocks away.
During the hour-long video, a detective asks Hernandez if he’d like to relay a message to Patz’s parents.
Etan’s parents, Julie and Stan.Photo: AP (2)
“That I’m really sorry that I never meant to hurt their child,” he blubbered. “I never mean to hurt him. And I hope they can forgive me for what I did.”
Stanley Patz watched the footage form the gallery without apparent emotion. Patz’s mother Julie made a brief appearance in court Thursday morning and then left.
Toward the end of the tape, detectives present Hernandez with the same missing persons poster of Etan Patz he had claimed not to recognize hours earlier. “This is the boy you strangled,” a detective asks.
“Yes,” he replied.
At the detective’s direction, Hernandez writes “I choked him” on the poster and signs it.
Defense lawyer Harvey Fishbein has argued that Hernandez – who has an IQ of 70 and borders on mental retardation – was psychologically coerced into believing he’d committed the horrific crime.
“There’s no question in our minds, when the detectives that spent eight hours with him were finished, he was convinced he had something to do with the disappearance of Etan Patz,” Fishbein said.
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