The jury deliberating in the murder trial of a man accused of kidnapping and killing six-year-old Etan Patz in 1979 says it is deadlocked after two weeks of deliberations.
The judge told jurors to continue deliberating after they announced on Wednesday that they have been unable to reach a unanimous decision in the trial of Pedro Hernandez. They began deliberations on 15 April after hearing evidence since the end of January.
They have asked to see dozens of exhibits, to have hours and hours of trial transcripts read to them and for access to a computer to organize their thoughts.
Hernandez made a stunning confession in 2012 that he had killed Etan, who disappeared on his way to school in 1979 in the Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood where Hernandez, a teenager at the time, worked as a clerk in a corner store. But the boy’s body was never found, nor any trace of his clothing or belongings.
Hernandez was barely mentioned in police reports of the investigations of the day. But witnesses came forward at his trial earlier this year to say that periodically in the years after Etan’s disappearance, Hernandez mentioned strangling a child who came into the store.
In a statement to police following a tip-off from a relative in 2012, Hernandez, now 54, said he lured the boy to the shop basement and killed him.
“I grabbed him by the neck and started choking him,” the court heard that Hernandez had told investigators.
Witnesses said he had also admitted molesting Etan, which Hernandez later denied to investigators.
Defense lawyers told the jury hearing the case in state supreme court in Manhattan that the defendant, from Maple Shade, New Jersey, was innocent and his confessions were nothing more than the ravings of a mentally ill man with a low IQ.
Moreover, his lawyers pointed the finger instead at a convicted pedophile, Jose Ramos, telling the court he had confessed while in prison in Pennsylvania to killing Etan.
After Etan’s disappearance, the boy’s image was one of the first to be displayed on milk cartons in a public campaign to find him, and his case heightened national awareness of missing children.
Former president Ronald Reagan in 1983 designated 25 May, the date had Etan disappeared four years earlier, as National Missing Children’s Day.
