Ramos, 82, died March 7 at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, prosecutors said this week in court filings connected to Pedro Hernandez’s case involving the 1979 disappearance of first grader Etan Patz. Prosecutors said Jose Antonio Ramos had long been among the men suspected by investigators, even as the criminal case history against Hernandez continued to unfold. His death removes one potential witness from future inquiries tied to a case that has remained at the center of public attention for decades.
Ramos had been suspected for years in the disappearance of Etan Patz, one of the first missing children to be pictured on milk cartons, and whose disappearance became a national cause. Prosecutors said Ramos was never charged in Etan’s disappearance, and court records and reporting around the case describe him as having denied abducting the 6-year-old. Ramos also refused to testify during Hernandez’s trials, according to reporting in the case file history.
Rabbi Howard Cohen, a former prison chaplain who said he maintained contact with Ramos for decades, described Ramos’s later circumstances. Cohen said the situation was “pretty bleak,” recalling that he fielded calls from hospitals about Ramos’s care. Cohen said Ramos, estranged from his family, listed Cohen—described as a rabbi from the New England area—as an emergency contact.
The reporting described how Ramos’s suspected role was developed over time and through multiple phases of investigation. Investigators looked at Ramos in the early 1980s after allegations that he took backpacks from two boys and tried to lure them into a drain pipe in the Bronx where he was living. Ramos told police that he had a relationship with a woman who walked Etan and other children home during a bus strike, but the reporting said investigators found no hard evidence linking him to Etan’s disappearance.
Ramos later traveled for years, attending gatherings described as a loose collection of peace activists, and he faced accusations tied to those events, including allegations of luring boys and sexually assaulting them. Ramos pleaded guilty to a sex charge in 1990 and served decades in prison, with the reporting noting that he also faced additional convictions tied to Pennsylvania cases that kept him incarcerated through 2012.
After Ramos finished serving the Pennsylvania sexual assault sentence in 2012, reporting said he was rearrested on sex-offender registration violations involving where he planned to live, and he was convicted and sentenced again to six to 20 years in prison. A Pennsylvania court later held Ramos was not subject to the registration law as it had been applied, and he was released in May 2020, according to the reporting.
Once released, Cohen said Ramos bounced between New York and Florida and sought unsuccessfully to reconnect with relatives. Cohen also said he remembered a phone call from Florida in which someone had bought a violin from a stranger and found Cohen’s business card tucked into the instrument. Cohen said that by then, Ramos had settled in New York near Washington Square Park.
Meanwhile, the case’s central prosecution history still centers on Pedro Hernandez. Reporting said Hernandez’s first trial ended in a hung jury, and the second produced a murder conviction that a federal appeals court overturned last year, setting up a forthcoming third trial. Hernandez’s lawyers plan to suggest Ramos was the real culprit, and Hernandez’s case status is not described as changing because of Ramos’s death MSI previously reported when a judge declined to dismiss charges and set the next trial.
Etan Patz was last seen May 25, 1979, after taking his first solo trip to the bus stop two blocks from his downtown Manhattan apartment. Over the years, the reporting said, narratives connecting Ramos to Etan remained part of the wider picture in litigation and investigation, including a wrongful death lawsuit against Ramos that followed Hernandez’s initial trial. The reporting also said Ramos complained in 2013 to The Citizens Voice newspaper that narratives connecting him to Etan were “without substance or merit,” and that he refused to participate further by testifying at Hernandez’s trials. With Ramos gone, prosecutors said the ability to ask him questions about Etan’s disappearance has ended, even as Hernandez’s legal process continues.