A key detective in the Etan Patz case took the stand Friday, as the prosecution tried to show that Pedro Hernandez, the man accused of killing Etan nearly 36 years ago, was trying to hide a big secret from police. Michael Scotto filed the following report.
NYPD Detective David Ramirez turned up at the New Jersey home of Pedro Hernandez, looking to talk with him about the 1979 disappearance of Etan Patz.
Testifying Friday, Ramirez was asked by prosecutors about that encounter three years ago. The detective told jurors that Hernandez "lost all the color in his face" when he said he was with the NYPD's missing persons squad.
Hernandez consented to hours of questioning, but then grew agitated, the detective said, asking, "What are you trying to do, pin this on me?"
With its questions, the prosecution tried to show that Hernandez had a big secret to hide. But the defense objected numerous times to that line of inquiry. They claimed the prosecution was trying too hard to get the detective to remember the meeting.
"This is the detective that was with him for this six-and-a-half hours or seven hours of unrecorded interrogation, and I was objecting to the leading nature of the questions, as though the detective had no recollection on his own," said Harvey Fishbein, Pedro Hernandez's attorney.
The defense was annoyed that most of the meeting wasn't recorded on tape, even though other investigators watched the encounter in another room through a video feed.
The end of he interrogation was recorded, a tape that is expected to be played in court on Monday.
Hernandez is accused of luring 6-year-old Etan into a SoHo bodega, choking him, stuffing his body into a bag and throwing him in an alley.
Prosecutors have already shown jurors a video of another interrogation in which Hernandez confessed to the killing.
The defense argues that Hernandez suffers from mental illness and falsely confessed.