<p>^very possible, or Aron looked like someone who he’d seen in Synagogue. The boy’s father said Leiby was so obedient that if you told him to sit in a chair and wait for you to come back, he would do that. Which is what he did for his killer – he waited 7 minutes for Aron to go into the dentist’s office to pay a bill.</p>
<p>If I were a pedophile, I would try to look as normal and non-threatening and familiar as possible. This sicko didn’t become a child murderer overnight. He probably consciously planned to be in the area where kids were, hoping one of them would get lost, and ask him for directions.</p>
<p>I really feel for these parents. Sometimes, despite your best intentions, bad things happen. I’ll never forget when S2 was in kindergarten. There was bus service and the stop was 1/4 down the road from our house. I could see it from our kitchen window. In fact, I could see the school playground from our front yard, but you couldn’t get there directly because of fences. We had driven S2 by the stop and walked to it from the house several times, pointing out to him landmarks to know when to get off the bus.</p>
<p>On the first day of school, I was watching, the bus stopped and he didn’t get off. I immediately called the school (this was pre cell-phone) and they radioed the bus driver. He had not recognized the stop and didn’t get off. The driver said she would bring him back. I waited more than 1/2 hr. at the bus stop and no bus came by. I was getting more frantic by the minute. I went back into the house and called the school. The secretary didn’t know what had happened, and again radioed the driver who was actually back at the bus company and said she had dropped him off. </p>
<p>Just as panic set in, someone walked into the school with S2. Because it was hard to turn the bus around, the driver had dropped him off back at the school which was only one block further than the stop from our house. He headed off in the wrong direction, away from our house. Fortunately, he didn’t get too far, and a kind neighbor asked him where he was going and brought him back to the school. </p>
<p>It so easily could not have been a kind neighbor. We had had a parental kidnapping at gun point the week before in another school in this small town. I raised h*** at the school and they switched to a smaller bus and dropped the K kids off at their doorstep. When he got old enough to have to use the bus stop, we drove him to school.</p>
<p>To this day, I get chills when I think of that day.</p>
<p>I know that feeling. When my D was three she went next door with the two older neighbor girls to play. Apparently their mom needed to take them on an errand and somehow, not really sure how it happened, my D was sent home alone. The houses are extremely close together but she wandered off. I was happily going along thinking she was at my neighbors and then noticed that their car was gone. I went over, nobody was home and I panicked. i started wandering the neighborhood frantically calling her name. I found her sitting IN THE ROAD, playing with the sand that accumulates on the side of the road. I live on a main street with lots of traffic. I can still remember running and scooping her up. It gives me the dry heaves to this day.</p>
<p>I guess I have missed some of the reporting on this story so can someone explain what his explanation was for taking the boy?
I’m just not buying this at all. I think we are going to find out lots more about this guy in the coming days. I hope its true for that little angel’s sake that there was no molestation but…I’m just not buying it.</p>
Then the parents, schools and camps in this community are terribly misguided and naive and the NYPD should be knocking on every door to give then a reality check. They seem to believe that they live in a walled off utopia filled with just “their” people, but there are no gates to the neighborhood to prevent any criminal or mental case from entering, there are no tests to see if anyone moving in there is law abiding and sane. My goodness, that description might as well be a pedophile’s dream–come to our neighborhood where our unworldly little kids wander unsupervised all the time! And the traffic issues described by one poster above are just the icing on the cake. I think one underlying issue here is that the Hasidim have huge families, making adequate supervision a particular challenge, so when a kid gets to an age where it seems he can navigate on his own, it’s a relief to have one less to oversee. I hope the residents are all re-thinking their child-rearing practices.</p>
<p>tango, reading your story brings back memories to me too (but not quite as bad perhaps). But back in Kindergarten, which was a half day program and so it was a mini bus with just Kindergarteners on it and took kids to their door…I waited and my kid never came home. I called another kid’s mom in the class who lived up the road and her kid was already home. I was freaking out. I called the school and lo and behold,the driver went back to school at the end of dropping the class off and my D was asleep on the seat and he hadn’t seen her. Whew.</p>
<p>TutuTaxi, yes, Hasidism is a branch of Orthodox Judaism, founded by the Baal Shem Tov in the 18th century and prevalent in Poland, Galicia, and the Ukraine; see the article at [Hasidic</a> Judaism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasidic_Judaism]Hasidic”>Hasidic Judaism - Wikipedia). I suppose they’re popularly known as the primary exponents of Jewish mysticism, belief in wonder rabbis and miracle workers, ecstatic dancing; that kind of thing. My father’s family were from Lithuania and were not Hasidim, but misnagdim, or opponents of Hasidism. Sometimes people would just generally call non-Hasidic Eastern European Orthodox Jews “Litvaks,” because of the association with Lithuania.</p>
<p>My mother and her family were German Jews; a very different kettle of fish even before the 19th century and Emancipation.</p>
<p>I certainly couldn’t tell a Hasidic from a non-Hasidic ultra-Orthodox man by appearance. I suppose the Hasidim are known for wearing fur hats (shtreimels) on the Sabbath. Even for the regular black hats worn daily, each Hasidic “court” – mostly, I think, named for the town they came from in Eastern Europe – wears a distinctive hat. See the article on “The Hats of Borough Park” at [url=<a href=“Loading...”>Loading...]Hats[/url</a>], with photos at [url=<a href=“Loading...”>Loading...]Hats[/url</a>].</p>
<p>Personally, what I think parents – and schools – in that neighborhood should be explaining to their kids even if they do walk by themselves is that they shouldn’t trust a stranger no matter what kind of hat he’s wearing, Hasidic or regular Orthodox or otherwise. Go into a store, look for a woman with children, but for God’s sake don’t ever get into a car with a stranger. It’s so tragic that it never crossed these parents’ minds to tell any of that to this poor little boy.</p>
<p>I imagine many of us have “close call” stories and I think that’s why this tragedy touches something so deep within us as parents. When my son was three, we were at my kids’ school for Open House. When we got to my daughter’s classroom, DS was right next to me. I bent down to sign the sign-in sheet and in the time it took for me to sign my name, he vanished. Instantly, my kids and I fanned out looking for him and there was no trace. The school activated the PA system asking everyone to look for him, but the din in classrooms drowned out the announcements. The school was bordered by a very busy street. I was beside myself. When DH arrived I had to tell him our son was missing. It took 20 minutes until he turned up in another classroom. He was apparently just wandering around the school having a good time and even though we’d been searching rooms and making announcements, he’d gone unnoticed. I really thought for a few minutes that I might not see him again. Those moments make a lasting impression and give every parent who has had a scare some insight into what those first moments must have been like for the parents when they realized their son was missing. Most of us are so fortunate that our kids ran into a kind person or that a car didn’t turn the corner, etc. We are the fortunate ones, and this family was so devastatingly unfortunate. My heart goes out to them.</p>
<p>Thanks Donna. I read an article where people in this neighbor were saying Aron was not one of them. Did they mean since he was not a Hasidic he was not one of them? Would an 8 y/o be able to make the visual distinction between a Hasidic male and an Orthodox male?</p>
<p>^Yup mimk6. The first day ever I let my daughter cross the road alone to call on a friend. She had to stop at the corner with a stop sign out front of our house, and check for traffic before crossing. I watched out the window (worried about how she would handle the traffic)…and wouldn’t you know it, as she stood at the intersection, a van pulls up and a man starts talking to her! I go out to ask what is going on. He says ‘she looked lost, I was offering to help her…’ Can you believe this!? He starts to argue with me, that its perfectly okay for a middle age man to drive up alone in a van and offer a ride to a little lost girl. I call the police on phone, and he takes off. I couldn’t get the license number but I also call the newspaper and they did a story with the description. People recognized my description and called in and from that, and a police photo line up, I was able to identify him. Due to privacy laws they could not tell me much, since he hadn’t broken the law, but the female officer whispered to me, privately, ‘he is known to us’. UGH! </p>
<p>That experience really rocked me and made it challenging to ‘let go’ as a parent over the years, with each new step. And still does. But I stand by the data, and repeatedly remind myself of the statistics and used them to ensure I don’t let my own nerves stand in the way of her development. Just because that happened did not change the risk factor.</p>
<p>I would guess that almost every parent has had an experience where their child seemed to have vanished and they thought for some period of time that he or she was lost forever. When my son was about six, my ex and I lost him for about 5 or 10 minutes at the Liberty Science Center – each of us thought he was walking with the other one, and we suddenly realized he was with neither of us when we got to the cafeteria. Of course we were frantic, but eventually found him in the crowd (it was horribly crowded, which made it difficult to look for him) not that far outside the cafeteria entrance, weeping piteously. Fortunately, he had stayed where he was. And then when he was 12, I lost him for about half an hour at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC – of all places – when I thought he was directly behind me as we left the exhibition area and I turned around and he wasn’t there. It turned out he had wandered off without telling me, to look at one thing he wanted to see again. Meanwhile, I was near-hysterical, and convinced I’d never see him again, and reported his disappearance. Ugh. And the very first time he was allowed to cross the 4-way intersection at the end of our block by himself, he was hit by a car making a left turn, which apparently didn’t see him because he was so short (my own mother’s nightmare when I was little). He was knocked down, and bloodied and bruised, but didn’t hit his head (thank God), and the lady driving the car was probably more upset than he was. She was weeping. And every time I remember it, I feel ill, and start thinking about how easily he could have landed on his head.</p>
<p>Most of us have had narrow escapes with our children – just as we probably had narrow escapes of our own as children; I certainly did. Most of us, and our children, were very lucky. It’s such a horrible tragedy that poor Leiby chose this man to speak to. The whole thing really does have the feel to me of some monstrously sad Grimm’s fairy tale about a child being eaten by an ogre he meets in the forest. But it was real.</p>
<p>“The whole thing really does have the feel to me of some monstrously sad Grimm’s fairy tale about a child being eaten by an ogre.”</p>
<p>^^Donna, that is exactly how I felt about this. I cannot wrap my mind around how a human being can kill an innocent little boy and mutilate his body…</p>
<p>My D was lost too around the same age at the Holocaust Museum. DH and I and our son went searching for her and for about half an hour, I had that awful nauseating feeling that we wouldn’t see her ever again. We reported her disappearance and ten minutes later, she was taken to us by a security guard who recognized her after receiving the message that a child was lost.
It ruined our visit to the museum, after standing in a long line waiting to be admitted.Somehow we’ve never gone back.</p>
<p>tututaxi - in answer to your question about an 8 yr old being able to distinguish, based on clothing, between who is “just” Orthodox and who is a member of a Hasidic sect - it’s possible, but more likely Leiby just thought this guy was a fellow religious person who would help him out. </p>
<p>Actually, in Hasidic communities, criminals have been known to dress as Orthodox/Hasidic Jews to gain entrance to businesses, etc, to rob, steal, and on. I am sure pedophiles and criminals of all kinds know how to “blend in” with whatever community they are targeting.</p>
<p>I agree with all the posters that the reason this story resonates particularly is that we have all “been there” - either in reality, cause we took our eyes off our kids for 5 seconds, or in our imagination. </p>
<p>We have to try and do our best to warn/walk our kids through different scenarios; but that is no guarantee. Neither is never letting them go/do anything unaided. It is hard dealing with the ultimate lack of control that is at the heart of parenting. </p>
<p>Doing things alone is part of growing up, just like learning to drive (another unbelievably difficult part of “letting go”)! Each kid/circumstance is different; and a lot is plain luck. My s grew up in a neighborhood with a lot of Irish Catholic and large Jewish families; a lot of kids who had a lot of freedom; I did the best I could but it was almost impossible to not let him run around with those kids. Did they run around as a group? Most of the time. Not all!</p>
<p>This is such a horrific crime and it happened in an area of Brooklyn where the community looks out for one another. It is also a community that would not be likely to give their children cell phones. I worked in this area of Brooklyn for many years and this little boy is not unlike most of the children who are raised with little to no knowledge of the news or what is going on outside of the community. He trusted this monster and went with him because there is complete trust in one another. He saw a man that looked safe who was obviously Jewish, wearing a yarmulke, although not Hasidic and he went with him. The children in this community are taught to trust each other because of the tight close connections. This neighborhood relies on its own ambulance crew and they do not rely on the police as other neighborhoods do. They really take care of each other. God Bless this family as they grieve for their little boy and may the community as always help them through this. This crime will certainly bring change to Boro Park and the parents will start to discuss the issues that mainstream parents have been discussing with their children. Not even the mother knew what this monster did to her son because there is no television in the homes, and the newspapers were being kept from her. This is exactly how the children are raised…no Television…no books or newspapers that are not related to their learnings. He went with his murderer because the children are taught to trust adults…how would a child who only knows adults as good and protective act?</p>
<p>It seems from this story that it’s only Leiby’s mother who doesn’t know the details, and that the family is doing all it can to keep them from her. There’s also a great-grandmother who’s ill, and hasn’t even been told about his death. </p>
<p>And I am not totally surprised because I don’t think all of a sudden one day someone turns into someone capable of these sick behaviors. Even if he had never done anything this horrific before, it is very likely he suffers from some mental illness (not claiming insanity but simply not healthy mentally).</p>
<p>Thank you, Sooziet, for the link. This is not a surprise. I really believe that these types of crimes do not happen in isolation. There is a history and that is becoming apparent. The story that the poor boy was not molested has to be lies. If the man was stalking other children and attempting to kidnap boys and had expressed his preference for Brookline because there were more boys there, well…</p>