In the latest Etan Patz Trial shocker, a witness testified that his accused murderer Pedro Hernandez once confessed to strangling a “muchacho.” Hernandez is on trial for the second time after his first trial for murdering Patz ended in a hung jury.
According to a report in The New York Daily News, Hernandez former wife Daisy Rivera, who is now 50, testified in court that she heard Pedro Hernandez make the confession more than 30 years ago at a a prayer group meeting in Camden, N.J.
According to Rivera the boy in question, “violated him [Hernandez]” which resulted in Hernandez becoming enraged.
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“He said that after he felt violated he got very angry and he lost control and he grabbed the person by the neck, ” she recalled.
Many of the jurors who voted to convict Hernandez at his first trial have been in attendance at the retrial. The New York Post reports that 7 of the 11 original jurors who voted to convict can be seen sitting on the prosecution’s side of the gallery along with a number of former alternate jurors.
Former juror Cynthia Cueto spoke with reporters outside the courtroom on the first day of Hernandez’s retrial and was quoted in the Post as saying, “We felt very strongly then, and we feel strongly now, that it’s a very strong case.”
Etan Patz was born October 9, 1972, to Jewish parents. He disappeared in SoHo, lower Manhattan, on May 25, 1979. Etan was the first missing child to be pictured on the side of a milk carton.
The case of Etan Patz’s disappearance was reopened in 2010 by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office. A self-confessed suspect, Pedro Hernandez, was charged and indicted in 2012 on charges of second-degree murder and first-degree kidnapping. In 2014, the case went through a series of hearings to determine if Hernandez’s statements before receiving the Miranda warning were legally admissible. His trial began in January 2015.
