Suspect Confesses to Grisly Murder of Missing Jewish Boy
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
A suspect was arrested after the body parts of a missing 8-year-old Orthodox Jewish boy were found in a Brooklyn dumpster and inside the suspect’s home early Wednesday morning, according to published reports.
Leiby Kletzky, who disappeared on his way home from his Jewish summer camp on Monday, was discovered stuffed in a red suitcase inside a trash bin in the Greenwood Heights section, police told the New York Daily News.
Police said Levi Aron, 35, was suspected of abducting and killing the boy, the paper said. He confessed to the crime and led cops to the dumpster, about two miles away from the spot where Kletzky was last seen alive, police said. Charges were pending.
Cops said Aron, a divorced hardware store clerk, didn’t know little Leiby.
“He has no excuse,” a source said of a possible motive. “He doesn’t know why he did it.”
Police said they also found body parts believed to be those of the boy inside the 35-year-old man’s refrigerator, the Associated Press reported.
“Whoever did this is sick beyond belief,” Assemblyman Dov Hikind (D-Borough Park) told NY1, a television station.
Aron is Jewish and lives and works near the camp, police said.
When cops showed up at Aron’s apartment, they found the door ajar. They asked him where the boy was and he pointed to a blood-spattered kitchen.
The tragic slaying unfolded after the little boy pleaded with his parents to let him walk home from day camp alone for the first time on Monday afternoon.
They agreed to meet him halfway, but Leiby never showed up.
Surveillance footage showed the boy standing alone on a nearby corner and later following a bearded man. That man was later shown getting into a gold car, although the video did not show the boy getting in with him.
After the parents called police, a massive search including both the NYPD and volunteers from Jewish security patrols blanketed the neighborhood.
Police said they later tracked the gold car to the suspects home on E. 2nd St. in Brooklyn, the New York Post reported.
The boy’s heartbroken father, Nachman, a passenger-van driver who has five other children, wept as he watched the surveillance footage, the Post reported.
“He had tears in his eyes,” Moishe Lefkovitz, the manager of the locksmith shop where the footage was taken, told the paper.
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said there was no sugar-coating the tragedy.
“This is every parents’ nightmare,” said Kelly. “We understand that. This is what makes this case so horrific.”
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
