Etan Patz Killer Sentenced To 25 Years To Life In Prison, Prosecutors Say

SOHO, NY — The man convicted of kidnapping and killing 6-year-old Etan Patz in 1979 will serve at least 25 years in prison. Pedro Hernandez was sentenced Tuesday, nearly four decades after the little boy's disappearance from a SoHo street shocked the city and the nation.

Etan was walking to catch his school bus in SoHo — his first time walking to the bus stop alone — when he disappeared. His body was never found, although investigators combed the city for decades.

The case remained unsolved until police arrested Hernandez in 2012 and charged him with the boy's killing. The former SoHo bodega clerk was found guilty of second-degree murder and of kidnapping by a grand jury in February. On Tuesday, a judge sentenced the 56-year-old to 25 years to life, the maximum sentence.

Hernandez's conviction comes after a previous trial that ended in a hung jury. In the first trial, a holdout juror remained unconvinced of Hernandez's guilt.

Hernandez was convicted without any physical evidence tying him directly to the crime, although he made multiple confesssions to killing the boy. His lawyers said those confessions, to different people and with different details each time, were merely evidence of a personality disorder that caused him to confuse reality.

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance said the case has been one of his "highest priorities" since he took office.

"Etan was never forgotten," Vance told the New York Times in an interview before the sentencing. "We refused to let him disappear into history because we were committed to taking another hard look at this case, and that hard look paid off."

"When Etan did not come home on the afternoon of May 25, 1979, the Patz family was changed forever," Vance said in a statement after the sentencing. "In the intervening years, they did not know where Etan was – whether he was dead or alive, whether he was being abused, or whether he knew that his parents and the police never stopped looking for him....Through this painful and utterly horrific real-life story, we came to realize how easily our children could disappear, ripped away from us right in our own neighborhoods."

For more news from SoHo and New York City, sign up for Patch news alerts here.

This post has been updated with additional information.

Lead image via Rich Mitchell on Flickr.