Etan Patz.
How many people have shivered at the mention of his story? How many times did his photograph, so hearbreakingly cute, once again bring forth the feelings of grief and fear?
How long has the name Etan Patz served as shorthand for the deepest of parental terrors — the child who set off walking the two blocks to the school bus and was never seen again?
Thirty-three years.
On Friday, 33 years after the 6-year-old boy vanished from a New York street, Pedro Hernandez, a 51-year-old man who had worked as a stock boy in a nearby food store, was charged with second-degree murder.
More than three decades. Enough time for a child to grow up, go to college, get married and have children of his own.
But not this child.
His disappearance launched the missing children movement. His picture was one of the first to be put on a milk carton. President Ronald Reagan designated May 25, the day Etan disappeared,National Missing Children’s Day.
Etan Patz became an iconic story of child abduction, becoming the fearful answer to a common child-rearing question: How old does a child have to be in order to be allowed to walk alone to school?
Parents wonder, agonize and then make their calls, relying on our sense of our communities, our children, the distance, the foot traffic along the route. I counted myself lucky to have neighborhood kids, a baby sitter and two children, and therefore few reasons one of my girls would need to make the walk alone.
But when they did, I thought about Etan Patz.
And parents like me thought about other children, too.
Like Jeanine Nicarico, who was 10 years old and home from school sick when she was raped and murdered in 1983.
It is such a common occurrence, a child staying home sick from school. But her murder posed the public question: At what point is it safe to leave a child home alone?
I was asking myself the question one time when I left my then-12-year-old daughter, who was home from school sick, alone in the house while I walked the dog. I got about two blocks into my walk when I decided that the answer for me, for now, was, “Not yet,” and rushed home.
And the question of when a child is old enough to baby-sit?
It was hard not to think of Holly Staker, the 11-year-old Waukegan girl who was raped and murdered while baby-sitting in 1992.
News stories enter our cautionary consciousness, and not just stories about children. Every time I board a Metra train, I think about Rachel Barton, and tighten my hold on my purse straps.
They are personal tragedies, events that leave specific families and friends with unimaginable burdens of grief. But when a horrific story becomes a public one, it becomes a communal touchstone.
The Etan Patz story has apparently, finally, come closer to a resolution. The agonizing length of time it has taken gives it something in common with other instances of harm to children.
It was 26 years between the time Jeanine Nicarico was killed and Brian Dugan pleaded guilty. It has been 20 years since Holly Staker was murdered, and with Juan Rivera cleared of the crime and released from prison in January, there is still no resolution.
The events that have become cautionary tales for people who only hear about them from afar have something in common: We can easily imagine ourselves in them.
A child home sick from school? A girl out baby-sitting? A boy walking two blocks to the school bus? It’s the stuff of everyday life.
But the pain of Stanley and Julie Patz, or of other parents who have lost children to unspeakable violence, as they endured years or even decades of grief, turmoil, uncertainty and regular reopening of their wounds?
That is unimaginable.
We were haunted by their stories as they made their way through the public realm. We followed them, we feared them, we tried to draw lessons from them even when we weren’t sure there were lessons to be learned.
But their tragedies are theirs alone. We can wish them healing, and surely we do, but we are outsiders. And the lesson we can draw from that is simple: We are lucky.
