A former hardware store clerk serving a long prison term for kidnaping, murdering and dismembering an 8-year-old Hasidic Jewish boy in Brooklyn 14 years ago died in an upstate hospital Wednesday, the Daily News has learned.
Levi Aron, convicted of the murder of Leiby Kletzky, died about 10:25 a.m. in the medical facility where he had been receiving treatment for an unspecified medical condition since Aug. 23 after a transfer from Wende Correctional Facility near Buffalo.
Thomas Mailey, a spokesman for the state prisons, said his death was expected and the family requested no autopsy.
Julia Xanthos/New York Daily News
Leiby Kletzky
Kletzky disappeared on the afternoon of July 11, 2011 as he returned home from a school day camp in Borough Park. Police and thousands of volunteers conducted a block-by-block search.
Investigators focused in on Aron, then a 35-year-old hardware store clerk, after security video showed Leiby meeting a man outside a dentist’s office and getting into his car. Cops identified the man as Aron and went to his apartment on July 13.
Aron then displayed parts of Leiby’s body to the police and told them he had discarded the rest of his body in a dumpster in the Greenwood Heights section of Brooklyn.
He provided a written confession admitting to drugging and smothering the boy, though he pleaded not guilty to the crime.
Leiby’s body had traces of a muscle relaxant, the painkiller Vicodin and Tylenol in his blood. Then Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes said Leiby’s wrists bore ligature marks and that Aron inexplicably took the boy to a wedding the night of July 11 in the Hasidic enclave of Monsey, N.Y. then returned him to the apartment.
Levi was convicted at trial in August 2012 of second-degree murder and kidnaping and sentenced to 40 years to life in prison. He was not eligible for parole until May 2049, records show.
Mailey said further information about Aron’s death would come from the Erie County Medical Examiner’s office.
In 2017, Aron’s brother Tzvi Aron, 29, was found dead in a basement closet in the same home where Leiby’s remains were found. Tzvi Aron’s body was bound and wrapped in a blanket.
The case was initially classified as a homicide, but the city Medical Examiner had difficulty establishing an official cause of death.
