New York, NY – A former bodega stock clerk arrested for allegedly luring 6-year-old Etan Patz off a SoHo street and strangling him in a basement has been placed on suicide watch at a hospital as a precaution, NBC 4 New York has learned.
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Pedro Hernandez, 51, was taken to Bellevue Friday, a source familiar with the case said. He had been set to be arraigned after police announced his arrest in the 1979 missing child case that has mystified New York City for decades.
Judging just how many suspects there were in this case. It’s frightening just how many sex offenders and murderers were in the 2 block area this poor child had to walk to get to his bus stop. Let this be a wake up call to the Agudah in their current day attempts to protect molestors.
I remember this case very well. So very sad. So very tragic.
And it had major repercussions.
It changed so many childhoods.
Stranger danger reached a frenzy to the extent that children were kept home and it was very hard to see any kids playing outside. The kidnapping has had ramifications for decades.
Should we keep our children under constant surveillance? Is this over-protection that in the long run hampers the child’s development? Or is it simply the bitter reality that there are terrible monsters out there and we cannot take the slightest chance? These are dilemmas every parent has to face.
However, the overwhelming majority of cases of abuse are committed by trusted friends, family members, teachers, and authority figures.
The chances of a child being kidnapped is probably on the order of 1 in a million.
The chances of a child being abused is, according to some reports, in the range of 10 – 30 percent.
Should we put cameras on every street corner in Boro Park and Flatbush (with interesting ramifications on Shabbos and Yom Tov, among other issues), or should we invest the same money in safety education?
There are no easy answers.
Too bad suicide watch doesn’t mean we get to watch him commit suicide.
We should help and encourage any child molestor who wants to commit suicide.
We have a walled-in backyard so our kids are allowed to play there unsupervised. The kids are not allowed to play in the front of the house without an adult watching them.
its reported that he put the child in a plastic bag and put it in the garbage can.My question is didn,the sanitation men feel the body when it made its pickup .Weird.
May H . comfort the parents.