Etan Patz

What happened

Etan Kalil Patz, 6, left his family's SoHo apartment on the morning of May 25, 1979, to walk alone for the first time to his school bus stop. He was last seen at 8:00 a.m. at Prince and Wooster Streets, wearing a black cap, a blue corduroy jacket, blue pants and blue sneakers, and carrying a blue bag with elephants on it, according to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. He never reached the bus and was never seen again. His body has never been found, and he was declared legally dead in 2001.

Etan's disappearance helped launch the national missing-children movement. His photograph, taken by his father, a professional photographer, was one of the first pictured on milk cartons in the national campaign of the 1980s, and in 1983 President Ronald Reagan proclaimed May 25, the anniversary of his disappearance, as National Missing Children's Day. NCMEC still lists him as a missing child today and shows his photograph age-progressed to 17 years old.

In 2017, after an earlier mistrial, Pedro Hernandez — who had worked at a bodega on Etan's route in 1979 and confessed in 2012 — was convicted of kidnapping and felony murder and sentenced to 25 years to life. A federal appeals court overturned that conviction in July 2025, but on June 22, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated it, holding that the appeals court had exceeded its authority. Etan himself has never been found.