Because as it turned out the kibitzers were right, in their own way: The boy had been taken by an outsider. Just not the kind of outsider the residents of Borough Park could imagine. One afternoon in the spring of , a boy named Levi Aron fell off his bicycle. Or perhaps the accident occurred in , when Aron was Sometimes Aron would recall that he had fallen of his own accord, and sometimes he remembered that he was knocked over by a passing car.
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Sometimes his head was sliced by the spokes of his front wheel, and sometimes he somersaulted onto the asphalt, his head breaking open in a puff of bright pink. But in recounting the incident for friends, Levi Aron always stressed the same thing: The accident changed him. Aron was a nebbishy kid, shy and withdrawn. He was born into a large family that moved between Brooklyn and Monsey, a Jewish community in upstate New York, before settling in a three-story house in Kensington, just over the eastern boundary of Borough Park, their lives half in and half out of its tight-knit Hasidic universe.
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He was not. He attended shul but had trouble concentrating. Scripture—the same scripture that other yeshiva students devoured with ease and pleasure—was to him an impenetrable wall. He later told friends that he felt from an early age like an outsider. Aron clashed frequently with his father. Jack liked to talk. He liked to talk over his wife, over his children. The first was his mother, the only relative who seemed to understand him. The second was music. Aron spent hours listening to albums: pop, disco, rock.
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All were forbidden commodities, anathema to Jack, who encouraged Levi to pursue a normal life of God and prayer. Aron spent three years at a high school in Borough Park, where he was remembered as a spectral and strange presence.
Aron left high school before graduation and failed to obtain his GED. Unable to find his own way out, he moved his belongings down to the basement of the Kensington house. By the morning of July 12, Borough Park had taken on the appearance of an armed encampment. As German resumed his search, he encountered packs of men and boys, some clutching maps, others calling out through bullhorns. The side streets, busy on normal days, were clogged with Shomrim cruisers and riot vans. German kept his head down, greeting acquaintances gruffly, rarely stopping to chat.
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At a locksmith at the intersection of 44th Street and Fifteenth Avenue, he got his hands on a rare working unit. But before he could view the tape, an employee had to summon the owner, who had just touched down at La Guardia. Yehuda Bernstein, the manager, met him at the door. Bernstein is a smoker and inveterate consumer of caffeine, and his office, which lies through a darkened lobby, was cluttered with cans of Red Bull and Coke Zero.
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It was this camera that German was interested in. He had become convinced that Leiby had followed 44th Street all the way south to its terminus, where the offices of Tri State were located. Unfortunately, Bernstein was a security freak who could not operate his own security apparatus. He slapped anxiously at his computer before bounding, with the jerky grace of a giraffe, to the phone, where he summoned Heshy Herbst, a friend and Protel employee.
It did not take them long to find Leiby. In the clip, the boy, clearly disoriented, lingers by the chain-link fence at the corner of the Tri State lot. A man, bearded and wearing a newsboy cap, approaches, and he and Leiby have a brief conversation. The man departs. Seven minutes pass.
Leiby remains in place. The man returns and walks with Leiby to a nearby Honda. The car, in a stroke of awful luck, sits partially hidden by a bush, its license plate out of view. He was Jewish. Criteria include the social position of the family and the perceived piety of the bride and groom. The most promising men and women are generally married early, around the age of 21 or For the next decade, they concentrate on building the biggest possible family—a mitzvah in the eyes of God.
Levi Aron remained single for the bulk of his twenties, a sign that he was considered by both his family and the neighborhood shadken to be of lesser stock. For companionship, he turned to a group of like-minded Jews, most of them also single men.
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They called themselves rebels, one friend remembers. They raged against the strictures of the frum, or pious, world and gathered at restaurants and bars around South Brooklyn—their go-to spot was a dimly lit kosher Japanese steakhouse called Fuji Hana. As a teenager, she claimed, the Israeli government had smuggled her out of her native Moldavia.
But soon, Diunov said, she was diagnosed with a fatal liver condition and, with the help of a Brooklyn Jewish group, moved to the United States with her daughter Edita to receive a transplant. When the operation was over, she decided to stay in New York. Diunov could be charming and fiercely funny, and she quickly found work in the diamond district.
Diunov, for her part, initially thought of Aron only as a friend, but when her relationship with Girshberg began to sour, she took a second look.
During that time, Aron also spent time with young Edita, apparently without incident. At one point, Diunov remembers, she and Diunov considered renting an apartment together.
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For Aron, the benefits of the arrangement would have been obvious: He could escape Borough Park, find permanent companionship, cure his isolation. But after just three months, the marriage began to fray, and by the end of the year, Diunov and Aron were divorced. They remained friends, however, and when Diunov married a man named Boris Shvartsman, Aron made a brief appearance at the wedding, where he dropped off some spare audio equipment for the D.
In , Diunov and Shvartsman were indicted on charges of conspiring to commit wire fraud. Shvartsman was convicted and has since relocated to New Jersey. She is heavier than she used to be—a result, she says, of all the medication she is forced to take—but remains sharp. He was just so full of rage. Oh, it made him so angry. Meanwhile, things were getting worse for Aron at home. His mother lost a battle with cancer, a profound blow, and his relationship with his father was increasingly cold and distant. At some point, he acquired a computer and began spending his free nights online, listening to music or exchanging messages on Friendster.
He also registered with the dating site Saw You at Sinai, which promised to help Jewish singles find their bashert, or soul mate. Insofar as Aron had a type, Kivel was it—strong-willed, outspoken, and something of an outsider herself. She was a frum Jew, but she was also gleefully profane, conversant in rock music and pop culture.
In September , Aron and Kivel spoke on the phone for the first time. During one conversation, he shared his plans to audition for American Idol. She did not have the heart to tell him that he was basically tone-deaf. Kivel shared a small house outside Memphis with her two children, her grandmother, and an uncle. Gradually, Aron told her more about his life.
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He sometimes had trouble making it to his job at Empire Supply, he confessed, although once there, he enjoyed the work well enough; it left him time to think. Kivel found herself increasingly attracted to Aron. After six months, Aron invited her to visit him in Brooklyn. She agreed but brought her mother along as a precaution.
Their house was well decorated and clean. One evening, as she and Levi drove to a nearby gas-station deli, it began to snow.