But then there was the tabloid photographer whose question they would never forget. Most of the reporters were respectful if awkward there is no painless way to ask a parent "How do you feel?" at such a time. Stan, bespectacled and also slight, had eaten next to nothing in the hours since Etan's disappearance, and was beginning to look almost transparent. Julie, a petite, ponytailed everymom, fought to control tears and a trembling muscle in her jaw. Now journalists gathered in the hushed, sun-washed front area of the loft, where Julie normally ran a small day-care centre and Stan, a commercial photographer, often sat immersed in photo-editing. Julie immediately called Stan, then the police.
Why not me?) It wasn't until 3.30pm, when he didn't arrive home from school, that Julie had called the neighbours, only to find that Etan had never made it to school at all. (Other kids are allowed, Etan had begged. That Friday,, six-year-old Etan, wearing his favourite Eastern Air Lines Future Flight Captain hat, had vanished somewhere in the two short blocks between his home and the school-bus stop, his first time ever walking alone. The Patzes' story was already front-page fodder.
Reporters mingled with scores of New York cops, as the grim-faced parents spelled their son's name over and over again: "E-T-A-N.
Not Soho, central London, but SoHo, the hip lower Manhattan enclave, which back then was an artist's urban frontier. T hirty years ago, the press swarmed on the SoHo loft of Stan and Julie Patz.