Tomas Rivera say he heard confession, but says it was on family to tell the cops - New York Daily News

A prayer group leader who claims Pedro Hernandez publicly confessed decades ago to killing Etan Patz insisted Monday that he told the suspect's family back then to turn him in.

"I talked to the family. I told the family what happened," recalled Tomas Rivera, one of about 50 people in a circle of worshipers who heard the confession in the early 1980s.

Relatives should have told cops, he said, adding: "If they didn't do it, that's not my responsibility."

But Hernandez's sister, Norma Hernandez, now claims she told police in Camden, N.J., 25 years ago that her brother had admitted killing a little boy.

"I reported it. Nobody did anything," the 54-year-old woman told the Star-Ledger of Newark Monday. She said she had no information other than the statements her brother had made.

Camden Police Chief Scott Thomson told the paper he was not aware of the sister's contact with his department during the 1980s. He added that it was too early to say whether an investigation would be launched to attempt to corroborate Norma Hernandez's claim.

Recalling the confession, Rivera, 76, said a group of worshipers had gathered in Salem County in southern New Jersey, and Hernandez, speaking in Spanish, admitted to strangling a little boy.

"He was supposed to turn himself in," Rivera insisted, expressing not an ounce of remorse for his silence. "The family was in charge of that."
Rivera said Hernandez's prayer-meeting confession took place at a farmhouse — not at St. Anthony of Padua Catholic church in Camden, N.J., as widely reported.

 He said he didn't come forward sooner with the information because Hernandez didn't confess to him one-on-one.

After he confessed, Hernandez came to only one other prayer meeting. He played the accordion for the group.

Rivera told detectives about Hernandez's confession for the first time when they interviewed him last week.

"What's happened was the truth because he's in jail now. They locked him up with the information we gave," Rivera said.

Still, inconsistencies that have emerged in Hernandez's new confession to police have some investigators doubting that he's the killer.

The shocking disclosure by the 51-year-old has people familiar with the case scratching their heads over how the boy's body was missed during the extensive search after he went missing.

Hernandez told police that he coaxed the boy into the basement of the bodega where he stocked shelves, at 448 West Broadway in SoHo, and strangled him. He said he hid the body in a bag until he could dump it in an alley a couple blocks away.

But John Saracco, 56 — whose father, Charles, owned the property at the time — said investigators scoured the building's basement, and every other building in the area, after the boy disappeared.

"They searched all the buildings around there," he said. "That building was definitely one of the ones that was searched. If (the body) was there they would have found it."

Law enforcement sources say that even if Hernandez had disposed of the body immediately, it is likely that a common grid search of the area — typical in a missing person case — would have revealed the body in the alley.

Hernandez quit his bodega gig shortly after the boy disappeared on May 25, 1979.
 
The suspect's mental health will be a major factor in the case. His lawyer Harvey Fishbein said during his arraignment that his client had a "long psychiatric history" and had suffered from both visual and auditory hallucinations.

A source close to the case confirmed that Hernandez had been taking olanzpine for schizophrenia.

"It's pretty strong stuff," the source said.

jfisher@nydailynews.com