The story of little Leiby Kletzky, the 9-year-old Brooklyn boy whose dismembered body was found in a refrigerator yesterday, just got worse. Levi Aron, the man charged with killing the innocent child, has spoken out. In a confession to the NYPD, he claims he would have returned the boy to his parents if a huge search for the missing child hadn't freaked him out.
In other words: the very first thing we all do when our kid goes missing is the worst thing to be done? That's exactly what parents didn't need to hear today, a day when we're still trying to come to terms with all the what ifs surrounding this tragedy. The story goes that Leiby begged his parents to let him walk home from day camp. They gave in only after his mom did a trial run with the little boy, basing their decision on the fact that they lived in a close-knit Orthodox Jewish section of Brooklyn.
But Aron says the boy approached HIM, that he had gotten mixed up on his walk and was asking for help. And then the story gets weird: Aron says he took the boy to a wedding in upstate Monsey. They returned to Brooklyn late, he says, so he had the boy sleep over, intending to return him home the next day. But then there was a search, and Aron claimed he was afraid. That's when he killed the child.
My first instinct was to shudder. I know if my kid went missing, the first thing I'd do was launch a massive search party (OK, second -- first I'd call the police). If that's the wrong thing, we're all in trouble.
But looking at the timeline that Aron has described has the odd result of making me feel better. This man can blame his depraved actions on being scared all he wants, but the fact is, he proved he was a mixed up human being from the get-go. When a normal person sees a child in trouble, they try to help get that kid to his parents as soon as possible. A normal man would have taken Leiby to the nearest police station. Only a depraved individual takes a stranger's kid to a wedding and then back home to his house to sleep over. Not searching for Leiby wouldn't have changed that Levi Aron was disturbed.
Does this confession leave you even more restless or is this just one sick man who shouldn't change the way we parent?
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