Brother of dismembered Brooklyn boy's killer found dead in mysterious circumstances
The death of Tzvi Aron is being investigated as a homicide
Nearly six years after detectives uncovered the dismembered remains of an eight-year-old boy in a Brooklyn house, the brother of the man now imprisoned for killing the child was found dead in the same family home.
Police responding to a call from the family on Friday discovered the body of Tzvi Aron, bound, wrapped in a blanket and stuffed in a basement closet, a law enforcement official said.
The 29-year-old bakery worker had last been seen on Tuesday. The death is being investigated as a homicide; Aron had recently been threatened but it wasn’t clear why, the official said. The medical examiner will determine a cause of death.
Tzvi’s brother, Levi Aron, pleaded guilty in July 2011 in the kidnapping and killing of eight-year-old Leiby Kletzky. Leiby got lost on his walk home from a religious day camp. It was the first time he was allowed to go home alone and he was supposed to walk about seven blocks to meet his mother, but missed his turn. On the street, he ran into Levi Aron, who promised to take the boy home.
Instead, Aron brought the boy about 64 km upstate to Monsey, New York, where he attended a wedding before bringing him back to his home. He kept him there overnight and the following day when he went to work at a hardware store.
Meanwhile, a massive search for the boy was underway in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn, home to one of the world’s largest communities of Orthodox Jews outside of Israel. Thousands of volunteers from the Hasidic community had assembled to comb the streets. Aron is Orthodox but not Hasidic. The Hasidim are ultra-Orthodox Jews.