Who Is Pedro Hernandez? Everything You Need To Know About Etan Patz Missing Case

The man convicted of killing 6-year-old Etan Patz in one of America's most notorious missing-child cases is set to be sentenced Tuesday afternoon in State Supreme Court in Manhattan. After two jury hearings, Pedro Hernandez was found guilty of kidnapping and murdering Etan.

Hernandez, who worked at a convenience store near the family’s Prince Street home, was arrested in 2012, almost 33 years after Etan's disappearance. While there was no physical evidence linked the man to the murder or kidnapping of Etan, he confessed luring the child into a store with the promise of soda. However, his defense attorney argued that his confession was a delusion caused by mental illness.

"As I will stress tomorrow, Pedro Hernandez is an innocent man and is not the answer as to what caused Etan Patz to disappear in 1979," Hernandez's attorney Harvey Fishbein said Monday, according to New York Daily News. "An unfair process resulted in an unjust verdict - we are confident that the system will correct itself during the appeal process."

Read: Who Is Etan Patz?

Etan disappeared on May 25, 1979, while walking to a bus stop alone for the first time ever. It was the last time he was seen and the child's body was never found. The anniversary of his disappearance was later marked as National Missing Children’s Day. Etan is also among the first missing children pictured on milk cartons.

Hernandez confessed he had strangled the boy in the shop’s basement after kidnapping him and later dumped the body in a trash bin.

“We finally got some justice for our son,” Etan’s father, Stan Patz said, according to the New York Times.

Hernandez's lawyer had filed a defense motion to dismiss the conviction against his client because jurors in the defendant’s first trial had sat with the boy’s father during the second trial. According to the lawyer, this showed the jurors support towards Etan that influenced the second jury decision.

“This is just another layer of the issues that will be presented on appeal,” he said. “We believe Pedro Hernandez never received a fair trial.”

In the ruling rejecting Hernandez's lawyer's defense motion, Judge Maxwell Wiley said: “Given the fact the jury was aware of a prior trial, the most they might have learned from a court officer, or some other source, was that former jurors were present in the audience during the trial, at times sitting with or near the deceased family. Without more, this fact alone is insufficient to set aside the verdict.”

The first trial ended in May 2015 after 15 days of deliberation, with one juror holding out for acquittal. The second jury found Hernandez guilty on Feb. 14.

Here are five facts about Pedro Hernandez:

1. Pedro Hernandez, who originally belonged to Puerto Rico, came to the U.S. in the early 1970s.

2. Hernandez married Daisy Rivera in 1983 and later divorced. Five years after his divorce, he got married to Rosemary Vargus

3. Hernandez has a daughter from his first marriage.

4. Hernandez moved to New Jersey shortly after he killed Patz.

5. A New York Times report said that Hernandez's father believed that his son had killed a child in a hit-and-run incident.