Etan Patz (Boy on the milk carton)

saltwn · #1 (**permalink**) 04-21-2012, 01:30 AM

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In May 1979, Etan Patz, a 6 ½-year-old New York City schoolboy, was given something he desperately wanted: permission to walk to the school bus stop all by himself, two blocks from his Soho home. On the Friday of Memorial Day weekend he enjoyed that new freedom for the first and only time.

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He never came home. He has since been declared legally dead. Charges have never been brought, although the police have long had a prime suspect in the case, Jose A. Ramos, a convicted child molester who remains imprisoned in Pennsylvania on charges in another case.

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Mr. Ramos had been an acquaintance of a woman who worked for the Patzes as a baby sitter and in May 1979, he lived in a tenement on the Lower East Side, about a mile from the family. He once admitted to investigators that he was with Etan on the day the boy vanished, but he denied abducting him or killing him.

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The search for the little blond boy spanned continents, and the uncertainty about his whereabouts wilted New York City like a suffocating summer heat wave. To honor the boy, President Ronald Reagan declared May 25 as National Missing Children’s Day.

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In 2010, the new Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., said he would reopen the criminal case and give it what his spokeswoman called “a fresh look.”

saltwn · #2 (**permalink**) 04-21-2012, 01:31 AM

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Among the first vanished children to appear on a milk carton, Etan became a symbol of a movement to draw attention to child safety – the day of his disappearance, May 25, became National Missing Children's Day. The case has bedeviled investigators as leads emerged and fizzled over the years; Etan, never found, was officially declared dead in 2001.

Etan Patz Case Launched Era Of Putting Missing Children On Milk Cartons

saltwn · #3 (**permalink**) 04-21-2012, 01:44 AM

After 33 years a new lead. The parents aren't making comment and their lawyer is out of the country.

Investigators excavate NYC basement in search of Etan Patz, missing since 1979

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On Friday, utility workers tied off gas lines outside a Manhattan building where investigators are searching for clues in the decades-old case. Investigators, after arriving Thursday looking for human remains, began ripping up the basement floor Friday evening.

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The New York Post reported that police had zeroed in on this same basement - where concrete had been freshly poured - just after the boy disappeared, but were stymied from digging it up when a neighborhood handyman, Othniel Miller, told them they would have to pay for repairs. Miller, now 75 an living in Brooklyn, had his workshop there and had given Etan a dollar for helping out the night before the youngster vanished, law-enforcement sources told The Post.

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Browne said a forensic team planned to dig up the concrete floor of the Manhattan basement and remove drywall partitions in an attempt to find blood, clothing or human remains in the building, just down the street from Etan's home. The work was expected to take up to five days.
FBI and police officials didn't publicly announce what led them to the site, but a law enforcement official told The Associated Press that investigators made the decision to dig after an FBI dog detected the scent of human remains at the building over the past few weeks.

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