Poster child for missing children declared dead
Published 9:00 pm Tuesday, June 19, 2001
Associated Press
NEW YORK – Etan Patz, the 6-year-old boy whose disappearance 22 years ago helped give rise to the national movement to publicize the cases of missing children, was officially declared dead Tuesday.
No one has been arrested, but the ruling cleared the way for a lawsuit against a prisoner long suspected in the boy’s disappearance.
Surrogate Court Judge Eve Preminger ruled Tuesday on a petition by Stanley K. Patz, the boy’s father.
It was “a horrible and painful day” for the boy’s parents, neither of whom attended the proceeding, said Patz’s lawyer, Brian O’Dwyer.
The boy’s court-appointed guardian, Roger Olsen, said the search for Etan had been the most exhaustive for a child since the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby.
Etan vanished on May 25, 1979, while walking two blocks from his home in lower Manhattan to a bus stop for the ride to school. It was the first time the child had ever walked to the bus stop alone.
The boy became a poster child for missing children, Olson said.
Olson noted that Etan’s parents distributed thousands of leaflets containing his picture and biographical information, and Etan’s picture was one of the first printed on the side of a milk carton.
A convicted child molester, Jose Ramos, now serving a 20-year sentence in Pennsylvania, is alleged to have once claimed responsibility for Etan’s death. The Patz family plans to file a wrongful-death lawsuit against him.
Ramos, a former mental patient, is said to have told a cellmate: “Etan is dead. There is no body, and there will never be a body.”
Stuart GraBois, a former U.S. attorney, told the judge that searches on several continents through several law enforcement agencies failed to find any indication that Etan was still alive.
Etan’s mother, Julia, has been so distraught that she refused to sign the petition asking the court to have her son declared dead, O’Dwyer said, but she did not oppose her husband’s filing of the papers.
Ramos’ sentence for molesting two boys runs until 2014. He was denied parole last year and will not be eligible again until 2003.
Copyright ©2001 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
