Etan Patz Was One of the First "Milk Carton Kids" — What Happened to Him?

Each year, a reported 460,000 children go missing, according to the Global Missing Children’s Network, equating to thousands per day. It’s a sad truth to reveal, but one that deserves the spotlight because, to be quite frank, that’s just too many kids disappearing. But many of the kids who do go missing are eventually located, and a large part of the reason is because of Etan Patz, whose disappearance in 1979 is credited with helping to reform how missing kids are found.

Patz is among one of the first faces to be featured on a milk carton, later dubbed the “Milk Carton Kids,” and while that method was critiqued and didn’t quite result in a large turnaround of missing kids, per the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, it led to the development of other, more effective ways of searching for missing kids, including the AMBER Alert system, which was invented in 1996.

But whatever happened to Patz, and was he ever found? Here’s an update on his case.

Etan Patz disappeared on the morning of May 25, 1979, while he was walking from his family's apartment to his school bus stop in the SoHo neighborhood of New York City, per the FBI. He was only six years old.

But his disappearance didn’t raise concern until after the school day was over, when he was supposed to return home. His mother immediately alerted police, and more than 100 officers were dispatched, along with bloodhounds, in search of Patz, according to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs.

When he still wasn’t located, Patz's face graced the side of a milk carton, one of the first to do so after Johnny Gosch and Eugene Martin went missing after being abducted on their paper routes. With still no sign of Patz, more attention began to focus on missing children as a whole, especially after the abduction of Adam Walsh from a Hollywood, Fla. shopping mall just two years later, which gained national attention.

Four years in, and still no Patz, and with thousands more children being added to missing persons lists, President Ronald Reagan designated May 25, 1983, as National Missing Children's Day, marking the anniversary of Patz's disappearance and further pushing the issue into the national spotlight.

Sadly, Patz was never found, nor were his remains. More than two decades after his disappearance, in 2001, he was declared legally dead. So essentially, his case has never officially been closed, since no one knows exactly what happened to him after he vanished.

However, there appeared to be a breakthrough in 2012, when a man named Pedro Hernandez, who was 18 at the time of Patz’s disappearance and had worked at a bodega near Patz’s bus stop, admitted to kidnapping and murdering him. A family member reportedly tipped off police, saying they thought Hernandez might have had something to do with it. When police questioned him, he confessed, and later repeated that confession on tape, according to the United States Court of Appeals.

In 2017, a jury found Hernandez guilty of kidnapping and murdering Patz, after a previous jury was unable to reach a verdict. He was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison, which he’s been serving ever since.

But in July 2025, a federal court threw out his conviction, and a new trial is now slated to occur. The reason being is his mental fitness is being called into question, along with how it may have affected his confession. According to the United States Court of Appeals, Hernandez has “a documented history of mental illnesses” and a “low IQ.”