STAYS MUM: Julie Patz (right), in New York yesterday, wouldn’t say if she thought Pedro Hernandez (left) killed her son, Etan, in 1979.
(Stanley Patz)
(Stefan Jeremiah)
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He returned to the scene of the crime.
After fleeing to New Jersey for a couple of years, Pedro Hernandez went back to work at the same bodega where he’d allegedly strangled 6-year-old Etan Patz, the suspect’s sister revealed yesterday.
Hernandez, 51, apparently wasn’t worried about being nailed as Etan’s murderer, working right above where he had allegedly stuffed Etan’s body in a box several years before — and amid fliers of the missing boy still posted in the area.
The suspect’s sister, Norma Hernandez, 53, said he returned sometime between three and seven years after Etan disappeared.
Hernandez had been working as a then-18-year-old stockboy at the bodega at 448 West Broadway when he allegedly killed Etan on May 25, 1979. He then moved to south New Jersey and wed his first wife, Daisy, said Norma.
The pair divorced after three years, and Hernandez moved back to New York. Sometime in the 1980s, he returned to New Jersey and married his second wife, Rosemary, who he’s been with for about 26 years.
Another sister, Luz, took him in, and he got his job back at the bodega, which was operated by Luz’s husband’s family, Norma said. Given that Etan’s parents stayed in their apartment down the block — hoping for their son’s return — they could have easily had interactions with their child’s alleged killer.
Norma yesterday detailed how she told Camden cops in the early 1980s that her brother might have killed a child.
Norma said she was spurred to go to police after another sister, Margarita Lopez, told her that Pedro had “confessed that he has killed a little boy in New York” while speaking at a church prayer group meeting in New Jersey.
“He strangled him and put him in the trash. That is what I heard, so that is the information I took to the police station in Camden,” Norma said.
“I thought they were going to take me inside to the detectives. They never did.”
The Camden cops said they have no record of Norma reaching out to them.
Meanwhile, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly, asked yesterday if he thought Hernandez could have killed other children, said, “We wouldn’t rule that out.”
Etan’s mom, Julie Patz, when asked if she thought Hernandez killed her son, said, “No comment. It’s an ongoing investigation.”
Additional reporting by Lorena Mongelli and Rebecca Rosenberg