The accused killer of Etan Patz likely lured the 6-year-old boy into a bodega basement to sexually abuse him, prosecutors said Tuesday during closing arguments.
“Maybe the defendant tried to sexually assault him but realized Etan was fighting back,” said Assistant District Attorney Joan Illuzzi-Orbon at the retrial of Pedro Hernandez, 56, in Manhattan Supreme Court. “Does he shut his victim up that moment by cutting off his air supply?”
Etan disappeared from a Soho street the first time he walked alone to the school bus stop on May 25, 1979.
Police canvassed the neighborhood for days, but the child’s body was never found and they were unable to gather any forensic evidence.
In 2012, cops received a tip that led them to Hernandez, who at the time of Patz’s disappearance worked at a bodega next to the bus stop.
Hernandez confessed to enticing Patz into the store’s basement with the promise of a soda and then strangling him to the point of near death.
Hernandez admits that he put Patz’s still breathing body into a plastic bag then into a produce box before dumping it in an alley less than two blocks away.
Illuzzi-Orbon played Casinovale a montage of seven of the defendant’s videotaped confessions to police, prosecutors and psychiatric experts since his 2012 arrest.
The same year Etan disappeared, he told a church group he had killed a boy in New York.
“It’s hard to explain away 30 years of confessions,” the prosecutor said.
It was the second time Illuzzi-Orbon had delivered a summation in the case. A prior 2015 trial ended in a hung jury with one holdout scuttling a conviction after 18 days of deliberations.
Six of the jurors from the previous panel listened to the closing Tuesday, seated in the same row as Etan’s father, Stan Patz, and in front of several case detectives.
On Monday, defense lawyer Harvey Fishbein argued in his summation that the real killer is convicted and currently imprisoned child molester Jose Ramos.
He was dating a woman hired to walk Etan and other neighborhood kids home during a school bus strike in 1979.
And Ramos, 72, once told a federal prosecutor he was “90 percent sure” he was with Etan the day he disappeared.
Fishbein argued that Hernandez is an unreliable and inconsistent man” and the only evidence against him “is his own words.”
Hernandez has low intelligence and a personality disorder which makes it difficult for him to distinguish reality from fantasy, the attorney said.
By the time cops finished interrogating him for 6.5 hours, Hernandez had been falsely convinced of his own guilt, the lawyer said.
The disappearance of Etan has haunted New Yorkers and baffled authorities for decades. He was one of the first missing children to appear on a milk carton.
A jury is set to begin deliberating Wednesday.
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