On Friday, after 18 days of jury deliberation, Justice Maxwell Wiley, the judge in the Etan Patz case, declared a mistrial. In the end, the jury was divided 11 to one. “I wanted to force people to think,” Adam Sirois, the lone holdout, told the New York Post. “Myself included.”

In 2012, Pedro Hernandez, 54, confessed—initially to police and again to prosecutors—to killing Etan Patz. The confession came 33 years after the boy’s unsolved disappearance. Defense attorneys argued that the confession was a false one exacted from a man with a low I.Q. and a personality disorder.

The New York Times reports that, on Friday, before the mistrial was declared, the jurors returned (again) to the physical description Hernandez had given of the Thompson Street passageway where he said he dumped Etan’s body:

While 11 jurors saw the passageway descriptions as bolstering Mr. Hernandez’s confession, the 12th, according to accounts provided by several people present, thought there could be an innocuous reason for the detailed memories.

“That is when we knew it was over,” said one juror, Christopher Giliberti. “He had a verdict that he wanted to reach and it was agnostic of the evidence.”

Adam Sirois, the twelfth juror who refused to convict, granted a long interview to the New York Post. “I introduced some very reasonable hypotheses,” he told the Post. “I also put in some stories like, ‘What if this could have happened?’”

“He would come up with theories that the defense didn’t even bring up,” the jury’s forewoman, Alia Dahhan, said.

“I tried to do as best I could. I was often at the white board trying to explain how this could have happened,” Sirois said, referring to the possibility of a false confession.

“People thanked me. Almost everyone thanked me, for not forcing them, but getting them to think a little differently about the case. A little bit differently about different facts, about what story could have happened, talking about other hypotheses.”

According to Sirois, after the first vote the jury was split 8-4 in favor of conviction, then 9-3, 10-2, and, on Friday, 11-1.

“I wish that I could have come up with more, said more, done more,” another juror, Jennifer O’Connor, told the Times.

Photo credit: AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.