A Brooklyn man pleaded guilty on Thursday to murdering an 8-year-old Orthodox Jewish boy last year, dismembering his body and stashing the parts in his freezer and a suitcase tossed into a dumpster. Levi Aron, 36, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and second-degree kidnapping in the death of Leiby Kletzky, who had lost his way…
Publicly funded security cameras planned for Brooklyn’s heavily Orthodox Boro Park neighborhood should not be directly accessible to the police, said the leader of the community’s influential volunteer security patrol, because this would make it harder to keep certain crimes within the community. Jacob Daskal, coordinator of the Boro Park Shomrim, said that a centralized…
Eliyahu Werdesheim, a member of a volunteer Orthodox Jewish neighborhood watch group, will serve three years probation for assaulting a black teenager in Baltimore. Werdesheim, now 24, avoided jail time for the November 2010 beating of Corey Ausby, then 15, the Baltimore Sun reported. Werdesheim was a member of the Shomrim watch group at the…
A $1 million state-funded program that will place 150 security cameras in Orthodox Jewish Brooklyn neighborhoods will be run by community volunteers and not by the police. The Leiby Kletzky Security Initiative, named after the 8-year-old Brooklyn boy who was kidnapped and murdered last year, will position high-tech security cameras near schools, synagogues and street…
In early May, a circuit court judge in Baltimore found Eliyahu Werdesheim, a 24-year-old member of a local Shomrim anti-crime patrol, guilty of assaulting a teenager named Corey Ausby. According to prosecutors, in 2010 Werdesheim and his brother, Avi, set upon Ausby on a residential street in Northwest Baltimore and beat him with the butt…
Among Righteous Men: A Tale of Vigilantes and Vindication in Hasidic Crown Heights By Matthew Shaer Wiley, 256 pages, $25.95 When 8-year-old Leiby Kletzky went missing in Brooklyn last June, it took two hours for anyone in Leiby?s ultra-Orthodox neighborhood to inform the police. The local volunteer Jewish security patrol heard almost immediately. The patrol,…
Boro Park’s Orthodox neighborhood patrol group, known informally as the shomrim — Hebrew for watch guards — has faced increased media scrutiny in the past few weeks over its role in the investigation of the killing of 8-year-old Leiby Kletzky on July 12. At issue is the fact that Kletzky’s disappearance was first reported to…
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