Baruch Dayan Emes

Community mourns in tragic end of missing boy

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On Monday afternoon, eight-year-old Leiby Kletzky left his Borough Park summer camp for a three-block walk to his mother. He disappeared into the streetscape and thousands of Jews mobilized to search for the boy. The massive search brought together the Shomrim, Chaveirim, Hatzolah, NYPD and FBI, and some 3,000 additional volunteers from as far as Lakewood, to find Kletzky, even as thousands more prayed for his safety. The search ended with a gruesome find of body parts stuffed into a trash container in Park Slope on early Wednesday morning.

“It’s a horror for every parent. I mean it’s just a tragedy today for everyone in New York,” said State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, whose staff participated in the search. “This is not a story about Borough Park, sick people are anywhere and in your own neighborhood.”

Kletzky was supposed to meet his mother at the corner of 13th Avenue and 50th Street after leaving day camp, but he never showed up. Surveillance videos recorded Kletzky walking alone, then with an Orthodox man, who was seen going into a Honda sedan. Although the boy is not seen getting into the car, investigators believe that he was a passenger.

The suspect, Kensington resident Levi Aron, 35 was tracked down through videos. Walking out of a dentist’s office, the hardware store worker was shown on tape giving directions to Kletzky on Monday afternoon. “Before establishing his identity, detectives had observed the suspect in a video recorded at 5:30 p.m. on Monday, where he was seen entering a dentist’s office,” NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said in a statement. “Detectives located one of the dentists… and established that the suspect had been in the dentist’s office on Monday to pay a bill.”

The dentist’s bill and the Honda license plate both identified Aron. When police knocked on his door at 2:40 a.m. on Wednesday, he confessed to the murder, revealing additional body parts in his refrigerator and blood-stained kitchen knives.

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