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<span style="font-weight: bold">NYC lost boy killed after asking for help</span>
Colleen Long
July 14, 2011 - 3:24AM
A young Hasidic Jewish boy who vanished while walking home from a day camp in one of the safest parts of New York city has been killed and dismembered by a stranger he had turned to for help after getting lost, police say.
An intense search for the missing eight-year-old, Leiby Kletzky, ended with the gruesome discovery of pieces of his dismembered body inside the home of a man who had been seen with the child around the time he disappeared, police said.
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said the 35-year-old suspect, Levi Aron, made statements implicating himself in the boy's death. Formal charges are pending. The home he shared with his parents was a crime scene on Wednesday but his parents were not there.
When detectives arrived at the man's attic apartment early afternoon, they asked him where the boy was and he nodded toward the kitchen, Kelly said.
Detectives saw blood on the freezer door which when opened revealed bloody knives, a cutting board and feet inside, according to a law enforcement official who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.
The rest of the body was found inside a red suitcase that had been tossed into a rubbish bin in another Brooklyn neighbourhood, police said.
Police and volunteers had been looking since late on Monday afternoon for Leiby, who disappeared while on his way to meet his mother.
The break in the case came when investigators focused on a grainy surveillance video that showed the boy, wearing his backpack, walking down the street with a man.
The video showed the man going into a nearby dentist's office as the boy stood outside, Kelly said. The dentist said he remembered someone coming by to pay a bill for a patient, and police were able to identify Aron using records from the office.
The medical examiner's office will determine a cause of death and positive identification.
Leiby was one of the neighbourhood's many Hasidic Jews, an ultra-Orthodox people who live in tight-knit, somewhat insular communities and abide by strict religious rules that require men to wear dark clothing that includes a long coat and a fedora-type hat. Men often have long beards and ear locks.
Most of the 165,000 members in the New York City area live in neighbourhoods in Brooklyn and are part of three different sects. Hasidism traces its roots to 18th-century Eastern Europe.
© 2011 AP
Colleen Long
July 14, 2011 - 3:24AM
A young Hasidic Jewish boy who vanished while walking home from a day camp in one of the safest parts of New York city has been killed and dismembered by a stranger he had turned to for help after getting lost, police say.
An intense search for the missing eight-year-old, Leiby Kletzky, ended with the gruesome discovery of pieces of his dismembered body inside the home of a man who had been seen with the child around the time he disappeared, police said.
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said the 35-year-old suspect, Levi Aron, made statements implicating himself in the boy's death. Formal charges are pending. The home he shared with his parents was a crime scene on Wednesday but his parents were not there.
When detectives arrived at the man's attic apartment early afternoon, they asked him where the boy was and he nodded toward the kitchen, Kelly said.
Detectives saw blood on the freezer door which when opened revealed bloody knives, a cutting board and feet inside, according to a law enforcement official who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.
The rest of the body was found inside a red suitcase that had been tossed into a rubbish bin in another Brooklyn neighbourhood, police said.
Police and volunteers had been looking since late on Monday afternoon for Leiby, who disappeared while on his way to meet his mother.
The break in the case came when investigators focused on a grainy surveillance video that showed the boy, wearing his backpack, walking down the street with a man.
The video showed the man going into a nearby dentist's office as the boy stood outside, Kelly said. The dentist said he remembered someone coming by to pay a bill for a patient, and police were able to identify Aron using records from the office.
The medical examiner's office will determine a cause of death and positive identification.
Leiby was one of the neighbourhood's many Hasidic Jews, an ultra-Orthodox people who live in tight-knit, somewhat insular communities and abide by strict religious rules that require men to wear dark clothing that includes a long coat and a fedora-type hat. Men often have long beards and ear locks.
Most of the 165,000 members in the New York City area live in neighbourhoods in Brooklyn and are part of three different sects. Hasidism traces its roots to 18th-century Eastern Europe.
© 2011 AP
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The ex-wife of Levi Aron said today she is stunned by his arrest for the grisly murder of an 8-year-old boy — calling him a good husband who was great with children.
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