Etan's alleged killer on suicide watch

A 51-YEAR-OLD Maple Shade man who is accused of murdering 6-year-old Etan Patz in New York 33 years ago was put on suicide watch Friday, the anniversary of the boy's disappearance and National Missing Children's Day.

Pedro Hernandez, of Linwood Avenue near Maple, admitted that in 1979, when he was 18 and a clerk at a Soho bodega, he killed Patz, who was waiting for his school bus.

Hernandez was being held in a secure wing of Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan Friday night.

He allegedly lured Patz into the basement of the bodega and strangled him on the same day that his the boy's parents allowed him to walk alone two blocks from his bus stop to their aparment for the first time.

Hernandez allegedly strangled the boy, stuffed his lifeless body in a bag and threw him in the trash.

Patz's disappearance ignited an intense international search, and marked the first time that a photo of a missing child was printed on milk cartons.

Crime-scene investigators were considering excavating the basement of the building that once housed the bodega to search for forensic evidence.

Authorities were also probing the Hernandez's medical history for signs of mental illness.

Former Soho resident Roberto Monticello, a filmmaker who was a teenager when Patz disappeared, said he remembered Hernandez as civil but reserved and "pent-up."

"You always got the sense that if you crossed him really bad, he would hurt you," Monticello said, although he added that he never saw him hit anyone.

Monticello said Hernandez was also one of the few teenagers in the neighborhood who didn't join in the all-out search for Etan, which consumed SoHo and the city for months.

"He was always around, but he never helped. He never participated," Monticello said.

- The Associated Press contributed to this report.