Police have arrested a suspect in the death of the 9-year-old Hasidic boy whose body was found dismembered in two parts of Brooklyn earlier today. Police say that 35-year-old Levi Aron led them to parts of missing boy Leiby Kletzky's body, half of which was found in a Kensington refrigerator, the other half in a Greenwood Heights dumpster. Regarding a possible motive, a source told the News: "He has no excuse. He doesn't know why he did it."
Aron, a delivery driver for a Brooklyn maintenance supply business, was taken into custody at 2:40 a.m. this morning, on his 35th birthday, at the apartment he shared with his parents. According to NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly, he made statements implicating himself in Leiby's death, although official charges against him are pending.
Police believe that the boy, who had been walking alone from his camp at 44th Street and 12th Avenue to Borough Park to meet his parents, stopped and asked Aron for directions. Kelly said surveillance video showed Leiby waiting for seven minutes while Aron went into a dentist's office, then followed Aron to his 1990 brown Honda Accord. Police tracked Aron down via his credit card, which he used to pay for his dentist visit. Volunteers of the local Shomrim patrol got the license plate number and reported it to police, which helped in apprehending Aron.
When police arrived at his home on E. Second St. in Kensington, they found a cutting board with three bloodied carving knives next to it—they also noticed blood on the handle of the refrigerator, in which they found body parts inside. Authorities believe that Aron "panicked" after he saw the police response to find the missing boy, and that's why he killed the boy." Kelly added that Aron allegedly suffocated him before dismembering him. "This is every parents' nightmare. We understand that. This is what makes this case so horrific," said Kelly.
Coworkers who know Aron told the dallies that he seemed rather unstable: "He's a funny guy. We knew something was wrong with him but he worked very well. He would flip out sometimes. If you really got him good he would flip out and you'd be asking 'What happened? We were just joking around.'" The owner of the Empire Supply hardware warehouse in Kensington where Aron worked implied he may have had a mental disability: "I would never believe it. We worked here for years...Let's just say I'm an equal opportunity employer." Others succinctly described him as a "loner."
You can see what is believed to be Aron's Facebook page here—he seems to like Lionel Richie, and is part of a group called " IS YOUR FAMILY SAFE? Find out who really lives in your area!" As New Yorker writer Ben Greenman aptly tweeted, "If this is the real Facebook page of Levi Aron, the man who killed Leiby Kletzky, it's horrifying for its banality."
