Mariela Lombard/for New York Daily News
Evidence is taken from SoHo building basement in 33-year missing case of Etan Patz.
It all comes back now in a rush, nearly 33 years after a 6-ye ar-old boy named Etan Patz went missing on the walk from his home on Prince St. to a school bus stop on West Broadway and changed the life of this city forever.
There had been other children abducted before in New York. But somehow the disappearance of this boy, one whose beautiful, smiling face was instantly known to us all, was like some kind of terrorist attack to the citys heart. Etan Patz was not safe on the streets of his own neighborhood and in that moment no child was safe.
And from the start, the people working the case or just familiar with it thought the boy had never made it out of the neighborhood. They just could not find evidence of that, could not find Etan Patz, who in those days became everybodys child.
Nobody ever really thought that some stranger pulled up in a Chevy Malibu and made off with this boy, Linda Fairstein was saying Sunday.
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She had begun running what was a pioneer sex crimes unit for the Manhattan DAs office three years before Etan Patz disappeared, working out of the Criminal Court building on Centre St., maybe a 10- minute walk from Prince St. And while Etan Patz was not officially her case, as Fairstein said yesterday, He was everybodys case.
Fairstein said, It haunted everybody who worked in my orbit, meaning sex crimes and child abuse. It haunted us and the detectives working the case. It was all anybody talked about in the city at that time. Now its all come back, and nothing has changed. We still want to find out what happened to that little boy.
If you did not live in the city in 1979 then you have no real way of knowing how the disappearance of Etan Patz completely dominated the news and the conversation in those first days and weeks. Front page after front page, Fairstein said. It might go away for a couple of days, and then would come right back .
Now the story of Etan Patz is back again, because this joint FBI/NYPD team has returned to Prince St. and, in so many ways, returned to the weekend of May 25, 1979. There is the excavation at 127B Prince, the jackhammering of a cement floor, the former workspace of a handyman named Othniel Miller, a floor relatively new when Patz disappeared, somehow not dug up at that time.
Of course, always there has been the belief, from so many, that the one who abducted Etan Patz is a convicted pedophile and career dirtbag named Jose Ramos, who knew both the boy and one of his baby-sitters.
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