Missing Girl and Mother's Vigil

May 25, 1979, was a day that changed New York City. That spring morning, a precocious six-year-old boy named Etan Patz woke up in his Prince St. apartment. After he dressed for school?he attended first grade at P.S. 3?he convinced his mother, Julie, to let him walk the two blocks to the school bus by himself. Julie had never before let Etan walk to school alone, but figured that now, at the end of the school year, her son could handle it.

The little boy said goodbye to his mother and walked out of the apartment with a blue schoolbag on his shoulder. He wore a baseball cap and carried one dollar in his pocket. It was the last time Julie Patz would ever see her son. Somewhere on that two-block walk to W. Broadway the streets swallowed Etan Patz whole. He was never heard from again. At this point, Etan Patz would be 28; it's assumed he's dead.

In New York in 1979 it was not unusual to see six-year-olds walking to school by themselves. After the Patz disappearance it became rare. The case became a national sensation, with the media and the police jumping all over it. Etan Patz became one of New York's most visible missing kids. His picture and story ran daily in the tabloids. Five hundred cops worked on a task force to find the boy. More than 30,000 posters were handed out and posted around the city. The picture depicted a button-cute towheaded little white boy with his whole life in front of him. Despite all the effort, Patz was never found and no one was ever arrested in his case, although the police had a suspect?a convicted pedophile who bragged in jail that he knew what had happened to the boy. Like the other leads before it, however, this one never panned out.

Etan Patz's disappearance was crucial in fostering awareness about missing kids. Milk cartons became ad hoc wanted posters for lost kids. May 25 was declared Missing Children Day; people throughout the country were encouraged, on that evening, to leave their porch lights on, to light the way home for vanished children. Before 1979 there was no national tracking system for the thousands of kids who go missing every year in America. Now there is one, and it's because Etan Patz walked down a Soho street and was never seen again.

Six years later and about 15 miles north of Etan Patz's Prince St. apartment?at 6:30 p.m. on Aug. 12, 1985, on Briggs Ave. in the Bronx?a pretty eight-year-old black girl named Equilla Hodrick sat with her mother, Terona, on their stoop. Terona was eight months' pregnant, and sitting out with her daughter was about all she could manage. A few friends of Terona's stopped by to talk. When she turned to look back at her daughter, she saw her running down Briggs Ave. and then making a left onto 194th St.

"That was the last time I saw my baby," Terona Hodrick, 43, told me the other day. She sighs when she speaks of her missing daughter. "I couldn't run after her because I was pregnant, but I figured that she was just going down the block and would be back. My niece saw her later at a game room down the block, but when it got later in the night I felt something was wrong and I called the police."

The cop who caught the call was Det. Frankie McDonald, a seasoned, 18-year veteran. "It was a heart-wrenching case," he says. "The mother was a genuine victim and this was a legitimate missing child. Many times in those cases another family member was involved. Not in this one."

The case has stayed with McDonald even though he's retired from the Police Dept. He moved on to the private sector, and is now the head of security at Pace University. McDonald is a big, warm man, the kind who creates a feeling of safety around him. He also has a cool head. In his 20 years as a cop, even though he was fired at three times, he never once had to discharge his weapon. "I was just lucky," is all he'll say to that, but you get the sense that if cops like Frankie McDonald had been working the Street Crime Unit in the Bronx on a certain night in the winter of 1999, Amadou Diallo would still be alive.

"He was the nicest man," said Terona Hodrick of McDonald. "My family and I loved him. I named my son after him. He did everything he could." Hodrick speaks with a slight accent that marks her as being from somewhere other than New York; she grew up in Toledo, OH.

The story of Equilla Hodrick's disappearance didn't make it into the papers. Something awful happens to a black girl in the Bronx?where's the story? But to the NYPD's credit, they launched a massive search for the little girl.

"Our bloodhounds picked up Equilla's scent and they led us down to Webster Ave. by the tracks of the Metro-North line," McDonald explains. "We had heard from the neighborhood people that a lot of homeless were camped out in the enclaves down there, so we went to do a search."

At that point, though, the searchers ran up against the logic of Metro-North's bureaucracy. It took McDonald hours to get through to the agency to get permission to search the tracks. The railroad didn't want to stop the trains, thereby inconveniencing their commuters. McDonald let them know that the neighborhood might not like the fact that train schedules were considered more important than a little local girl's life.

"We never did get them to stop the trains," he says. "They only slowed them down. We looked for quite a while but found nothing."

When McDonald got back to the 52nd Precinct, the search had become a news story. Only the story wasn't about Equilla Hodrick's disappearance?it was about how some cop had slowed down Metro-North. A reporter from Channel 2 stuck a mic in McDonald's face and demanded to know who'd made the decision to slow down the trains. McDonald looked at the female reporter and responded, "Nobody made that decision. We made the decision to search for a missing child. What is your story? That an eight-year-old girl is missing? Or that a few assholes from Westchester came home to a cold dinner? I don't have anything more to say to you."

"The media gave this case no play..." McDonald says now. "Very different from Etan Patz."

McDonald spent his last two years as a cop on the Hodrick case. He chased every lead obsessively, but nothing ever came of it. When he put in his papers to retire, he visited Terona Hodrick and told her he was turning in his badge. She sighed and answered, "Well, that's the end of it."

"She was right," McDonald says now. "After I left, there wasn't much more to be done, although every effort was made by the Police Dept. to find her daughter. Everything that could have been done was done. We tried. We really tried."

You don't often find a black woman agreeing with a white cop, but Terona Hodrick says, "I thought that the police did all they could to find my child. They worked hard. Especially Frankie McDonald. They searched every apartment building around here from Valentine Ave. to Webster. They really looked for Equilla, and for that I am grateful."

As of 2001, the Equilla Hodrick case is still alive. Terona Hodrick recently got a call from a newly formed cold-case squad in the Missing Person Unit. She still has hope. She's a mother. She has to.

"I still be praying that she will come home," she tells me. "I know in my heart that she is alive because I can feel her. You know how it is with a mother and her child. You can feel them. She's out there. I know she's not underground. Not my baby."

If she's right, Equilla is 23. "I hate to upset the mother but I don't think she is alive," Frankie McDonald says. "Equilla was very savvy for an eight-year-old. She knew her phone number. She was smart and street-smart. She would have reached out for the mother. She wasn't a troubled child and had a good relationship with her mother. If she could have called, she would have."

Hodrick, 43, refuses to believe that. She now lives on 101st St. and Columbus Ave. in Manhattan, but always keeps her phone number listed.

"I had to get away from the Bronx. All those bad memories. I wound up here. Whenever I move I keep my name in the book. I have to, so I can be reached. Someday I am going to hear from Equilla. Someday."

[sullivan@nypress.com](mailto:sullivan@nypress.com)