Etan Patz suspect charged with 2nd-degree murder
Pedro Hernandez, 51, (right) implicated himself in the 1979 disappearance and death of Etan Patz (left) and was taken into custody, the NYPD said. Credit: AP ; Inside Edition
A New Jersey man accused of luring 6-year-old Etan Patz into a New York City convenience store in 1979 and killing him has been charged with second-degree murder.
Pedro Hernandez was arrested Thursday after telling police he strangled Etan in 1979, when he was an 18-year-old stock boy at a convenience store where Etan waited for his school bus.
The 51-year-old Hernandez, of Maple Shade, N.J., was to be arraigned by video camera from his room at Bellevue Hospital, where he was in a secure wing. He had made comments about wanting to kill himself.
Etan disappeared on May 25, 1979, on his two-block walk to his bus stop in Manhattan in a case that made New York parents afraid to let their children out of their sight and sparked a movement to publicize and find missing and abducted youngsters.
