A man formerly suspected in infamous case of NYC missing child Etan Patz has died

NEW YORK– A man who was suspected for decades — before another man was charged — in the 1979 disappearance of New York City first grader Etan Patz has died, authorities said this week.

Jose Antonio Ramos died March 7 at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, prosecutors wrote in a court filing in the case of Pedro Hernandez — the man now facing a third trial in Etan’s haunting and infamous case. This helped make missing children a national cause in the United States.

Ramos, 82, has denied kidnapping the 6-year-old and has never been charged in her disappearance. But Ramos’ story is part of a complex picture painted over nearly half a century of investigation, Hernandez’s criminal trials and a wrongful death suit against Ramos himself.

Ramos spent most of his adult life imprisoned in Pennsylvania for, among other things, sexually assaulting a child there. He lived out his final years in New York selling salvaged items on the streets until he fell ill with cancer, said Rabbi Howard Cohen, a former prison chaplain with whom Ramos stayed in touch for decades.

“The situation was pretty grim,” said Cohen, who recalled receiving calls from hospitals about the man’s care. Estranged from his family, Ramos had listed the New England-based rabbi as his emergency contact.

Etan was last seen on May 25, 1979, proudly taking his first solo trip to the bus stop two blocks from the family’s apartment in downtown Manhattan. He was one of the first missing children depicted on milk cartons, and the anniversary of his disappearance became National Missing Children’s Day.

With Ramos gone, it’s also possible he’ll answer more questions about Etan – questions that dogged and irritated him. He complained in a 2013 letter to The Citizens Voice newspaper in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, that stories linking him to Etan’s case were “without substance or merit,” and he refused to testify at Hernandez’s trials.

Hernández was arrested in 2012 after making a confession that his defense claimed was false. His first trial ended in a hung jury; his second resulted in a murder conviction that a federal appeals court overturned last year, paving the way for a third trial in which his lawyers again aim to suggest that Ramos was the real culprit. His death changes nothing in their plans.

A drifter with artistic aspirations, Ramos came under suspicion in the early 1980s, when he was investigated over allegations that he took the backpacks of two boys and tried to lure them into a drain pipe in the Bronx where he lived.

He told police he had a relationship with a woman who accompanied Etan and other children home during a bus strike, but there was no solid evidence linking Ramos to Etan’s disappearance.

Ramos then toured the country by bus, attending rallies of a scattered group of peace activists. He was accused of luring boys onto his bus and sexually assaulting them at rallies in Pennsylvania. Ramos pleaded guilty to a sex charge in 1990 and served decades in prison.

Over the years, two prison informants claimed that Ramos made incriminating statements about Etan, and a former federal prosecutor said Ramos claimed to be “90 percent sure” that he took the boy to Washington Square Park in downtown Manhattan, tried unsuccessfully to prey on him and returned him.

During his interrogation under oath in 2003, Ramos said he had never met Etan and had “nothing to hide.”

Manhattan prosecutors never felt they had enough evidence to criminally charge Ramos. The boy’s parents eventually filed a wrongful death lawsuit against him, and after Ramos refused to answer some questions, a judge found him responsible for the boy’s death.

The judgment was overturned, at the family’s request, after Hernandez’s first trial. The child’s father, Stan Patz, who for years sent letters to Ramos asking, “What did you do to my little boy?” – said he had become convinced of Hernandez’s guilt.

Ramos completed his sentence in the Pennsylvania sexual assault case in 2012. Upon his release from prison, he was arrested again for violating sex offender registration rules by lying about where he planned to live. He was convicted and re-sentenced to six to 20 years in prison.

A Pennsylvania court ultimately ruled that Ramos was not subject to the registration law, which was passed after his initial conviction. He was released in May 2020, according to the state Department of Corrections.

Once free, Ramos bounced between New York and Florida, where he sought in vain to reconnect with loved ones, Cohen said. He remembers receiving a phone call from someone in Florida who had bought a violin from a stranger – Ramos, it seems, based on the buyer’s description – and found the rabbi’s card slipped into the instrument.

“That’s how he got by: he found things on the street and sold them,” Cohen said.

Cohen didn’t know exactly when Ramos received his cancer diagnosis. By then, Cohen said, Ramos had moved to New York, finding housing near Washington Square Park.