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NEW YORK — <\/span>A man who was suspected for decades \u2014 before another man was charged \u2014 in the 1979 disappearance<\/a> of New York first grader Etan Patz has died, authorities said this week. <\/p>\n Jose Antonio Ramos died March 7 at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, prosecutors wrote in a court filing in the case of Pedro Hernandez \u2014 the man now facing a third trial in Etan’s haunting and infamous case. It helped to make missing children a national cause in the United States.<\/p>\n Ramos, 82, denied abducting the 6-year-old and was never charged in his disappearance. But Ramos\u2019 history<\/a> has been part of a complicated picture painted through nearly a half-century of investigation, Hernandez’s criminal trials and a wrongful death lawsuit against Ramos himself. <\/p>\n Ramos spent most of his adult life imprisoned in Pennsylvania on convictions including sexually assaulting a child there. He lived his last years in New York selling scavenged items on the street until he became ill with cancer, said Rabbi Howard Cohen, a former prison chaplain with whom Ramos maintained contact for decades. <\/p>\n \u201cThe situation was pretty bleak,\u201d said Cohen, who recalled fielding calls from hospitals about the man’s care. Estranged from his family, Ramos had listed the New England-based rabbi as his emergency contact. <\/p>\n Etan was last seen May 25, 1979, proudly making his first solo trip to the bus stop two blocks from his family\u2019s downtown Manhattan apartment. He was among the first missing children pictured on milk cartons, and the anniversary of his disappearance became National Missing Children\u2019s Day. <\/p>\n With Ramos gone, so is any possibility of him answering more questions about Etan \u2014 queries that dogged and irked him. He complained in a 2013 letter to The Citizens Voice<\/a> newspaper in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, that narratives connecting him to Etan’s case were \u201cwithout substance or merit,” and he refused to testify<\/a> at Hernandez’s trials. <\/p>\n Hernandez was arrested in 2012 after giving confessions that his defense says were false. His first trial ended in a hung jury; his second produced a murder conviction<\/a> that a federal appeals court overturned last year<\/a>, setting up a forthcoming third trial where his lawyers again aim to suggest<\/a> that Ramos was the real culprit. His death doesn’t change their plans.<\/p>\n A drifter with artistic aspirations, Ramos came under suspicion in the early 1980s, when he was investigated over allegations of taking backpacks from two boys and trying to lure them into a Bronx drain pipe where he was living. <\/p>\n He told police he\u2019d had a relationship with a woman who walked Etan and other children home during a bus strike, but there was no hard evidence linking Ramos to Etan’s disappearance. <\/p>\n Ramos then traveled the country by bus, attending gatherings of a loose collection of peace activists. He was accused of luring boys into his bus and sexually assaulting them at the gatherings in Pennsylvania. Ramos pleaded guilty to a sex charge in 1990 and served decades in prison. <\/p>\n Over the years, two jailhouse informants claimed Ramos made incriminating statements about Etan, and a former federal prosecutor said Ramos claimed to be \u201c90 percent sure” he had taken the boy from downtown Manhattan’s Washington Square Park, tried unsuccessfully to prey on him, and sent him on his way. <\/p>\n During sworn questioning in 2003, Ramos said he\u2019d never encountered Etan and had \u201cnothing to hide.”<\/p>\n Manhattan prosecutors never felt they had enough evidence to charge Ramos criminally. The boy’s parents eventually filed a wrongful death lawsuit against him, and after Ramos refused to answer some questions, a judge ruled him responsible for the boy\u2019s death. <\/p>\n The judgment was scrapped<\/a>, at the family’s request, after Hernandez’s first trial. The child’s father, Stan Patz \u2014 who for years had sent Ramos letters asking, \u201cWhat did you do to my little boy?\u201d \u2014 said he had become convinced of Hernandez\u2019s guilt.<\/p>\n Ramos finished serving his time<\/a> in the Pennsylvania sexual assault case in 2012. As soon as he walked out of prison, he was rearrested<\/a> on a charge of violating sex offender registration rules by lying about where he planned to live. He was convicted and was sentenced anew<\/a>, getting six to 20 years in prison.<\/p>\n A Pennsylvania court eventually held that Ramos wasn’t subject to the registration law, which was passed after his initial conviction. He was released in May 2020, according to the state Department of Corrections. <\/p>\n Once free, Ramos bounced between New York and Florida, where he sought unsuccessfully to reconnect with relatives, Cohen said. He recalled getting a phone call from someone in Florida who had bought a violin from a stranger \u2014 Ramos, it seemed, from the buyer’s description \u2014 and had found the rabbi’s card tucked into the instrument. <\/p>\n \u201cThat’s how he was getting by: He was finding things on the street and selling them,\u201d Cohen said. <\/p>\n Cohen wasn\u2019t sure exactly when Ramos got his cancer diagnosis. By then, Cohen said, Ramos had settled in New York, finding housing of some kind near Washington Square Park.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n