New York prosecutors announced on Nov. 25 that they would retry the man whose murder and kidnapping conviction in the 1979 disappearance of 6-year-old Etan Patz was overturned earlier this year.

The Manhattan District Attorney's Office wrote in a notice that it determined that "available, admissible evidence supports" the renewal of its prosecution of Pedro Hernandez on the same charges as before. Hernandez, now 64, was sentenced in 2017 to at least 25 years in prison for the kidnapping and slaying of Etan in New York City, in what is one of the nation's most infamous child disappearance cases.

A federal appeals court overturned Hernandez's conviction in July of this year after he appealed that a jury note was improperly handled during his trial and "prejudiced the verdict." In October, another judge gave the district attorney's office until Dec. 1 to decide to retry Hernandez, who remains in custody.

In a letter on Nov. 25 to a New York state court judge, the district attorney's office said it was "prepared to proceed." Hernandez's new trial must begin by June 1, 2026, or he will be released from custody.

Hernandez’s lawyers Harvey Fishbein and Alice Fontier said in a statement that they "remain convinced that Mr. Hernandez is an innocent man," according to the Associated Press and NBC News. Fishbein and Fontier added that they will be prepared for the retrial and will present "an even stronger defense," the news organizations reported.

Etan's disappearance shocked the country and sparked a movement for missing children, including the establishment of National Missing Children's Day on May 25 and a national hotline for missing children. The boy, who was never found and was declared legally dead in 2001, became one of the first missing children to be featured on the side of milk cartons as part of an effort to publicize their disappearance and receive investigative tips.

Etan was a "little boy whose name and face have become synonymous" with the nationwide issue of missing children, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The case, along with the murder of 6-year-old Adam Walsh in 1981, changed law enforcement's response to missing children and led to the creation of a coordinated national system.

What happened to Etan Patz?

Etan was walking to school from his home in the SoHo neighborhood of New York City when he disappeared the morning of May 25, 1979, the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Justice Programs said. It was his first time walking by himself to catch the school bus about two blocks away from his home.

But he "never made it" and when he did not return home from school that evening, his parents reported him missing to the police, according to the Office of Justice Programs. "After his mother alerted the police, more than 100 police officers and bloodhounds embarked on an intensive search for the missing boy," the agency said.

It was the largest and longest search for a missing child in the city in decades, The New York Times reported in 1979.

Case unsolved for decades

Etan's disappearance went unsolved for decades until Hernandez, a former store clerk who worked near the bus stop and was 18 when the boy disappeared, was named a suspect in 2012. At the time, renewed interest in the cold case prompted a relative to tell police that Hernandez had told a prayer group decades earlier that he had killed a child.

"This finally provided some answers for the family who had endured years of anguish and uncertainty, including repeated visits by strangers falsely claiming to be their son," the Office of Justice Programs said.

Hernandez later confessed to the crime, which his defense team argued at trial was false and was a result of his mental illness, USA TODAY previously reported. In Hernandez's confession, he said he offered Etan a soda to lure him into his store basement, then strangled the boy, put him – still alive – in a box, and left it with a pile of curbside trash.

After his first murder trial ended in a hung jury, Hernandez was convicted of kidnapping and murder at his second trial in 2017. He was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

Contributing: Jeanine Santucci, Greg Toppo, John Bacon, and Kathryn Palmer, USA TODAY; Reuters

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: New York prosecutors to retry man in kidnapping, killing of Etan Patz

Reporting by Thao Nguyen, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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