Levi Aron says he has a hard time talking about the day he chopped up a lost little boy who came to him for help.
"It hurts too much to think about it," the accused Butcher of Borough Park said in an exclusive Daily News interview - his first with any news organization since the July 11 murder that sickened the city.
"I don't know what happened," Aron said. "I just panicked."
Asked repeatedly if he wanted to apologize, the confessed child killer kept looking away and remained silent. At one point, he nodded his head, but would not say he was sorry.
Aron wore a wrinkled gray jumpsuit with a hospital bracelet on his wrist and appeared lethargic during an hour-long interview at Rikers Island.
His eyes were watery and he blinked almost uncontrollably.
Aron, 35, never once spoke the name of Leiby Kletzky, the Hasidic 8-year-old who approached him for help and wound up slaughtered.
He referred to the moment when he smothered the boy and carved him up as "the incident."
Aron repeatedly answered, "I don't know" to questions about what he did - and why.
"I remember little things," he said without elaborating.
Leiby lost his way last month - the first day he was allowed to walk home from day camp alone. He stopped Aron for help.
Aron told cops he took the boy to a wedding in upstate Monsey and brought him home, meaning to take him home the next day. But after leaving for work at the hardware store around the corner, Aron said, he got spooked by missing child posters and went home to kill the boy.
Told that many people are utterly baffled by his actions, Aron would not - or could not - explain why he took and kept the boy.
"He looked familiar. I thought I knew him," he said.
Police said they found no evidence of molestation.
Aron appeared ashamed and embarrassed when asked about Leiby, and stressed several times the boy slept in the living room, not his bedroom.
He said he gave Leiby a tuna sandwich for breakfast the next day. The fatal cocktail of drugs found in the boy's dismembered body was ingested later, he said, before "the incident."
He said he tried to get Leiby to come inside at the wedding - where the boy's life might have been saved if other guests had noticed the odd couple - but the child balked.
"He didn't want to come, so I let him stay in the car with the windows down," Aron said.
Aron has been found fit to stand trial, though shrinks say that he may be teetering on the edge of schizophrenia.
"I sometimes hear voices," he told The News, but refused to describe them or relay what they told him.
During the interview, Aron chatted almost normally about mundane issues but started to clam up when asked about the murder.
He is being held in a Rikers Island infirmary on a round-the-clock suicide watch. He leaves his cell only to shower. He hasn't spoken to his family since his arrest July 13.
Mostly, he said, "I stay in bed."
Asked if he wished he had never met Leiby, Aron said, "Sometimes."
No comments:
Post a Comment