New York This article is more than 6 years old

Brother of man who dismembered boy found dead in closet in Brooklyn

This article is more than 6 years old

Detectives found body of Tzvi Aron, the brother of a man who kidnapped and killed eight-year-old, in the same home where the boy’s remains were found

The brother of a man who kidnapped, killed and dismembered a lost eight-year-old boy has been found dead, his body bound, wrapped in a blanket and stuffed in a basement closet in the same Brooklyn home where detectives uncovered the remains of the boy nearly five years ago.

Detectives found Tzvi Aron’s body after police were called there by family members, a law enforcement official said.

Aron, 29, a bakery worker, was last seen on Tuesday. The death is being investigated as a homicide – Aron had been recently threatened but it wasn’t clear why, the official said. The medical examiner will determine a cause of death. The official was not authorized to speak publicly about an ongoing investigation and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Tzvi’s brother, Levi Aron, pleaded guilty in the kidnapping and killing of eight-year-old Leiby Kletzky in July 2011. Leiby got lost on his walk home from a religious day camp. It was the first time he was allowed to walk alone, and he was supposed to travel about seven blocks to meet his mother, but missed his turn. He ran into Levi Aron on the street, who promised to take him home.

Instead, Aron brought the boy about 40 miles upstate to Monsey, New York, where he attended a wedding before bringing the boy back to his home. He kept him there overnight and the following day as he went to work at a hardware store.

A massive search for the boy was held in the Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, home to one of the world’s largest communities of Orthodox Jews outside Israel. Thousands of volunteers from the Hasidic community assembled to comb the streets. Aron is Orthodox but not Hasidic. The Hasidim are ultra-Orthodox Jews.

When Aron noticed flyers plastered on lampposts with the boy’s photo, he got spooked, went home and suffocated the boy, police said. A toxicology report found Leiby had also been drugged.

Detectives found the boy’s severed feet, wrapped in plastic, in a freezer at Aron’s home, about two miles from the boy’s home. A cutting board and three bloody carving knives were found in the refrigerator. The rest of the boy’s body was discovered in bags inside a red suitcase in a trash bin about a mile from the home. His legs had been cut from his torso.

Levi Aron pleaded guilty to kidnapping and killing the boy, and is serving 40 years to life in prison.

In the years since, his family remained at the home in Brooklyn, which is divided into apartments. Tzvi lived in the basement apartment; Levi had lived on the top floor. Another brother lives there. The family’s mother died from cancer and a sister, Sarah, died while institutionalized with schizophrenia before Levi Aron was arrested, according to Levi Aron’s psychiatric report obtained by the AP.

Over the years the family has received dozens of death threats. On Friday, police once again cordoned off the cream-colored home, in Brooklyn’s Kensington neighborhood, as a crime scene.

“It was spooky,” neighbor Kathleen Henderson told the Daily News. “Everyone keeps an eye an on that house for obvious reasons. No one trusted them after that incident with the little boy.”

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