A one-time church pal of accused Etan Patz killer Pedro Hernandez testified Thursday that Hernandez confessed to him — just months after the 6-year-old’s 1979 disappearance — that he’d lured the child into his family’s Soho bodega and then stabbed him to death with a broomstick.
“Every day I see the kids walking by and I took one of these kids to go to the basement and offered him a soda. I took a stick and shove him a lot,” Ramon Rodriguez, 75, told jurors as he pantomimed the act of thrusting a sharp object up and down.
The former Campbell’s soup factory worker said a despondent Hernandez admitted the gruesome crime in the summer of 1979 during a church retreat as the pair walked on a farm in New Jersey.
But Hernandez, 54, in a videotaped confession to authorities in 2012, claimed he’d strangled the boy to death when he worked at the bodega next to the child’s bus stop.
His attorneys have maintained that the admission was false and coerced from Hernandez, who has a history of mental illness and an incredibly low IQ.
“He had something in his heart he had to get out,” Rodriguez said of the slight, shy man who attended the retreat only weeks after Etan vanished from a Soho street after being allowed to go to the school bus stop on his own for the first time.
“Did he tell you he did something else to the boy?” asked Assistant District Attorney Joan Illuzzi-Orbon.
“It came to my mind he may have abused the kid, then got rid of him,” said Rodriguez, who said on the stand that Hernandez didn’t admit that.
Defense lawyer Harvey Fishbein highlighted Rodriguez’s conflicting accounts to authorities over the years.
In June 2012, the jovial parishioner told investigators that Hernandez claimed he’d enticed the boy with candy, then abused him.
A few months later, he told authorities that a friend at the retreat told him the detail of abuse — not Hernandez.
When confronted with the discrepancies on the stand, Rodriguez became uncomfortable and admitted he might have said “abused” at some point.
“I did the very best I could,” he blurted. “There is no reason to kill a kid. There is no reason.”