Jose Antonio Ramos, a convicted child molester who was suspected for decades of killing Manhattan first grader Etan Patz, has died.
Ramos died at Bellevue Hospital at the age of 82 on March 7, prosecutors wrote in a filing in the case for Pedro Hernandez — a bodega clerk facing a third trial for killing 6-year-old Patz in the 1979.
Ramos denied abducting Patz and was never tried criminally for his disappearance. In 2016, Supreme Court Justice Joan Kenney reversed the 2004 $2.7 million civil ruling that said Ramos killed the youngster.
Ramos’s last years in the Big Apple were spent scavenging on the street before he was diagnosed with cancer.
He had found housing near Washington Square Park in downtown Manhattan after resettling in the city, Rabbi Howard Cohen, a former prison chaplain, told the Associated Press.
Ramos spent most of his earlier life behind bars in Pennsylvania on various convictions, including for sexually assaulting a child.
“The situation was pretty bleak,” Cohen said, noting Ramos has listed the New England rabbi as his emergency contact.
Patz became the poster child for missing children across the country after he vanished from a Soho street on May 25, 1979, while walking to his school bus stop alone for the first time. His body has never been found.
Ramos came under suspicion for Patz’s killing in the early 1980s after he was investigated for allegedly taking backpacks from two boys and attempting to lure them into a Bronx drain pipe.
He then told police he had a relationship with a woman who walked Etan and other children home during a bus strike — but evidence didn’t link him to the first grader’s disappearance.
A former federal prosecutor said Ramos claimed to be “90 percent sure” he had taken the boy from Washington Square Park, tried unsuccessfully to prey on him, and sent him on his way.
Two jailhouse informants claimed Ramos made incriminating statements about Etan.
Ramos said he’d never encountered Etan and had “nothing to hide” during a sworn questioning in 2003. Prosecutors never felt they had enough evidence to charge him criminally.
The boy’s parents filed the wrongful- death case in 2001 against Ramos, and he was declared civilly responsible for Etan’s death in 2004 before the ruling was overturned. The Patzes were awarded a largely symbolic $2.7 million judgment.
Hernandez, 64, became a suspect in 2012, when cops received a tip that he’d confessed during a prayer group to killing a child in New York.
A first trial ended in a hung jury in 2015, and a second one in 2017 that landed him a murder conviction was overturned by an appeals court in July.
Hernandez’s lawyers insist that he’s an innocent man and that delusions he suffered as part of his mental illness drove his confessions to the heinous crime.
With Post wires
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