MANHATTAN SUPREME COURT — The parents of Etan Patz, the 6-year-old SoHo boy who vanished in 1979, are asking a judge to throw out a civil court ruling that found convicted child molester Jose Ramos guilty of murdering their son, saying they are now convinced accused murder Pedro Hernandez is guilty of the “heartless crime.”
Stan Patz, the father of Etan, filed a sworn statement on behalf of his family in Manhattan Civil Court Wednesday, telling a judge they are certain Hernandez, whose trial ended in a hung jury last year but who faces a retrial in the 37-year-old case next month, is the real killer.
“Despite the lack of resolution in the first trial, after reviewing all the facts relating to the crime against Etan, and after sitting through the trial and hearing all the evidence, my wife and I — the parents of Etan Patz — now believe that Pedro Hernandez and not Jose Ramos was the perpetrator of this heartless crime,” the affidavit says.
Hernandez, a 55-year-old husband and father of three from New Jersey with no criminal record, was tried for Etan’s murder last year, after confessing to strangling the small boy when he worked in a bodega on Prince Street in 1979.
That trial ended in a hung jury, with one holdout juror saying he had doubts about Hernandez’s confessions — confessions that Hernandez’s lawyers argued were coerced and the delusions of a mentally ill man.
Hernandez’s lawyers also argued that convicted child molester Jose Ramos, a former boyfriend of Etan’s sometimes babysitter, was the real killer. Years ago, Ramos told a federal prosecutor that he tried to have sex with Etan, though he has denied being the boy’s killer.
In 2001, after Etan was declared dead — though his body or any another physical evidence was never found — the Patz family pursued a civil case against Ramos, who remains jailed for the molestation of two boys in Pennsylvania.
The family won a wrongful death case against Ramos in 2004, and was awarded a $2.7 million judgment, though they say Ramos has never paid any of the money.
In the affidavit, Stan Patz says they now want that civil ruling against Ramos overturned, arguing that when they pursued the case, they didn’t know about Hernandez.
Hernandez’s lawyer, Harvey Fishbein said in a letter to the judge handling Hernandez’s criminal trial that the affidavit is a “blatant assault on Mr. Hernandez’s ability to receive a fair and impartial trial.”
“The timing of this court filing and the immediate attendant publicity, particularly in view of the Patz family with the prosecution, raises profound questions that must be addressed immediately,” he wrote in the letter.
Fishbein is seeking a hearing from the judge.
Jury selection in Hernandez’s retrial is slated to begin in March.
Hernandez has been in jail since 2012, after he was arrested when a relative called police to say Hernandez had confessed to the crime years ago.
