(NEW YORK) — Pedro Hernandez, the man convicted of abducting and murdering Etan Patz, must be re-tried by June 2026 or he will be released from custody, a federal judge in New York ruled on Friday.

This is the latest twist in what Judge Colleen McMahon called “the nearly half-century long saga of the disappearance and presumptive murder” of Patz.

Six-year-old Patz went missing while walking to his school bus stop alone in SoHo in 1979. He became the first missing child whose face appeared on a milk carton and changed the way the country responds to missing children cases.

Hernandez’s first trial ended in a hung jury. In 2017, after Hernandez’s second trial, he was convicted of kidnapping and murder and sentenced to 25 years to life. Because of a lack of physical evidence, the trial hing

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