MANHATTAN SUPREME COURT — The judge in the Etan Patz murder case once again sent deadlocked jurors back for further deliberations over the fate of Pedro Hernandez, the store clerk accused of killing 6-year-old Etan Patz in 1979.
This is the second time that jurors told Supreme Court Judge Maxwell Wiley that they could not come to a unanimous decision in the case.
Wiley first sent the twelve jurors back into deliberations after they told him they were deadlocked on last Wednesday, only to have them return on Tuesday without a verdict. Sources told DNAinfo New York that the jury was leaning towards acquitting Hernandez.
“After serious, significant and thorough deliberations, we remain unable to reach a unanimous decision," the jurors wrote in a note to the judge on Tuesday.
“It's safe to say your verdict, whatever it may be, will be second-guessed publicly, by any number of people, but please don’t be concerned about that," Wiley said. "I'm going to ask you to continue your deliberations now, good luck."
Patz vanished without a trace on May 25, 1979 after his parents let him walk less than two blocks alone from his SoHo home to a bus stop for the first time.
Hernandez, a husband and father of three from New Jersey with no criminal record, was arrested and charged in Patz's death in May 2012, after a relative contacted police and said he'd confessed to the crime.
He gave several hours of videotaped confessions to police, in which he described how he choked the child, placed his limp body in a plastic bag, threw him in a box and dumped him in a garbage heap a couple of blocks away.
After decades of searching, neither Etan's body, nor any other physical evidence, was ever discovered in the case. He was officially declared dead in 2001.
Hernandez's defense argued vehemently that his confession was coerced — adding that he had a low IQ, suffered from hallucinations and delusions and was an “unreliable” source. His attorneys' placed the blame for Etan's murder on Jose Ramos, a convicted child molester, now jailed in Pennsylvania, who dated Etan's babysitter.
Prosecutors, however, said there was never enough evidence to link Ramos to Etan's disappearance.
They, instead, tried to convince jurors that Hernandez was indeed telling the truth, though they acknowledged that the details of his confessions did not always match up. They painted a very different version of Hernandez, as someone who was calculating and manipulative.
Prosecutors said Hernandez had seen the little boy numerous times at the bodega where he worked, brought him down into the basement where he sexually abused him, then killed the boy to hide what he had done.
Etan's disappearance nearly 36 years ago gripped the nation and helped galvanize the national missing children’s movement. The day he vanished, May 25, has been named National Missing Children’s Day.
His mother testified early in the trial last month that her son was a "trusting" boy who she watched walk a block to his bus stop, and then never saw again.
