MANHATTAN SUPREME COURT — The man charged with killing 6-year-old Etan Patz was not deluded when he confessed to abducting and murdering the boy and jurors should use "common sense" and find him guilty, prosecutors said Tuesday.
"It's hard to explain away 30 years of confessing," Assistant District Attorney Joan Illuzzi said of Pedro Hernandez, 56, during her closing arguments.
She later told jurors that "common sense" will guide them to "to easily make this decision" to convict the former bodega worker.
Hernandez, on trial a second time for Etan's murder, told police in 2012 that he strangled Etan in the basement of a SoHo bodega on May 25, 1979 — the first day the boy's parents allowed him to walk alone less than two blocks to the school bus.
He's also told inconsistent stories to several people throughout the years about harming a boy, lawyers say.
Defense lawyers have argued that Hernandez's confessions were false — the delusions of a mentally ill person with a low IQ who was unable to tell fact from fiction.
In May 2015, Hernandez's first trial ended in a hung jury after 18 days of deliberations.
Prosecutors Tuesday tried to tear apart the notion of Hernandez as feeble-minded, instead saying he was more calculating — someone who lured the little boy into the basement of the Prince Street bodega to fulfill his own sexual desires, then strangled him and dumped his body in a trash heap a couple of blocks away.
"I submit the defendant was keenly watching and admiring this beautiful, friendly child and knew what he came into the store for on a regular basis," Illuzzi said.
Hernandez, in his confessions that are the base of the prosecution's case, told police he had offered Etan a soda to get him into the basement of the store where he worked as an 18-year-old.
Defense lawyers contend those confessions were false and coerced by police.
In several hours of taped conversations with police, Hernandez said several times that he didn’t know why he killed the boy and denied touching him, something Illuzzi said is a lie.
She walked jurors through the other confessions the man had given to a friend, his ex-wife and his fellow church members over the years since Patz went missing. Confessions, prosecutors argue, that were the result of a guilty conscience.
Though there are inconsistencies in the accounts of how he killed Patz, prosecutors argue that there are enough similarities to conclude Hernandez is indeed the killer.
Illuzzi said one confession in particular, in which he told members of his church that he’d abused a child, is the most accurate. Hernandez said he strangled and cut him up, though he doesn’t speak of any sexual abuse in particular.
Prosecutors also refuted the defense argument that convicted child molester Jose Ramos was the actual killer. Ramos, currently in prison for molesting two other children, was dating Etan's babysitter and also molested her son.
Ramos has denied being the killer.
Hernandez, a father of three who has no prior criminal record, has been in jail since 2012.
Nearly four decades after Etan's disappearance caused a national outcry, his body has never been found. There has also been no other physical evidence discovered that would link any suspect to the case.
Hernandez's lawyer argued that the only case against Hernandez is his own words, but his words are unreliable — and, according to the judge's instructions, jurors cannot convict someone on their words alone.
Jurors are slated to begin deliberations Wednesday.
