Etan Patz (STANLEY K. PATZ)
Pedro Hernandez (Inside Edition)
The former SoHo bodega stock boy who confessed to murdering 6-year-old Etan Patz was charged with second-degree murder tonight after being taken to Bellevue Hospital and temporarily placed on suicide watch, authorities said.
Pedro Hernandez, 51, wore an orange jumpsuit and had his hands cuffed behind his back, FOX News Channel reported. His lawyer, Harvey Fishbein, was by his side and a police officer in front of him in a hospital conference room.
The official complaint charging murder in the second degree said Hernandez strangled Etan and placed his body in a plastic bag.
Hernandez told cops yesterday he had never seen Etan before that day — but once he spotted him, “I knew he was the one . . . [I] just felt the urge to kill,” according to a law-enforcement source.
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At 5:30 a.m. today, after being in police custody for more than 24 hours, Hernandez was taken to the hospital, saying he was depressed, off his psych meds and threatened to “kill himself,” a source told The Post.
Hernandez’s arraignment comes 33 years to the exact day since Etan disappeared.
Hernandez told cops he lured the child “with the promise of a soda, and led him to the basement of the bodega, and strangled him there,” said Police Commissioner Ray Kelly.
Hernandez then placed Etan’s body in a bag, took it about a block and a half away and left it “with the trash,” Kelly said.
Hernandez denied sexually abusing the boy, but investigators are skeptical, sources said.
In his written confession, Hernandez stated, “I’m sorry, I shoke [sic] him,” the sources said.
The arrest of the married New Jersey dad — who was 18 when Etan was killed — brought a sense of closure to the boy’s long-suffering parents.
Stan and Julie Patz were in Boston at the time of the arrest, but cops informed them of the dramatic development. “Mr. Patz was taken aback, a little surprised and overwhelmed,” said Lt. Christopher Zimmerman, head of the NYPD’s Missing Persons Squad.
Patz’s parents returned to their SoHo apartment this afternoon. They have not commented on Hernandez’s arrest.
The cancer-stricken Hernandez, a churchgoing teetotaler, was identified as a suspect in the past month by a member of his family after news broke that investigators were digging up a former handyman’s basement on Prince Street in late April.
Nothing was found there, but the search prompted Hernandez’s brother-in-law, José Lopez, to call the NYPD and tell them that Hernandez had admitted killing an unnamed child shortly after Etan vanished, sources said.
Hernandez first told relatives in 1981 he “had done a bad thing and killed a child in New York,” Kelly said.
Hernandez was picked up Wednesday at his home in Maple Shade, NJ, where he lives with his college-student daughter, Becky, 20, and his second wife, Rosemary.
Harvey Fishbein, Hernandez’s court-appointed lawyer, asked reporters to respect the privacy of his client’s family as they waited inside Manhattan Criminal Court this morning.
“It’s a tough day,” he said. “The family is very upset. Please give them some space.”
With NewsCore