Mayor Bloomberg tonight sat shiva with the mourning family of tragic, slain 8-year-old Leiby Kletzky, saying simply afterward, “It is what it is.
“It’s one of the most sad days in the city. It’s very tragic,” said Bloomberg, who wore a yarmulke and spent about 15 minutes with the boy’s grieving kin in Borough Park, Brooklyn, accompanied by Police Commissioner Ray Kelly.
“I don’t’ know why God sometimes does some things,” Hizzoner said. “The commissioner and I express our condolences to parents and grand parents and siblings, and there’s not a lot else we can say. .¤.¤. I think we should .¤.¤. before we go to bed, take a look at our children and recognize how lucky we are to have them. Pray this doesn’t happen to us.”
Kelly — asked by reporters about the probe into the abduction, murder and dismemberment of little Leiby at the hands of a neighborhood weirdo — only said, “The investigation is going slowly.”
Kensington resident Levi Aron, 35, has confessed to snatching the lost Leiby on July 11 and then killing and cutting him up in his apartment the next night.
NYPD investigators today removed seven dining-room chairs and a table wrapped in brown paper from Aron’s home, adding to a collection of furniture and mattresses they’ve already confiscated as potential evidence.
Aron’s two lawyers met with the accused murderer for two and a half hours today. Aron is being held in the jail section of Bellevue Hospital, where he is undergoing psychiatric evaluation and is on a suicide watch.
One of the lawyers, Pierre Bazile, said that before Aron’s arrest, he had been hearing voices in his head and had tried “to drown out the voices” by blaring loud music.
His condition makes it “more likely than not” that if he is declared competent to stand trial, he will plead not guilty by reason of diminished mental capacity, said his other lawyer, Gerard Marrone, to The Post.
“He did admit to me that in the last few months, less than a year, he’s been hearing voices,” Marrone said. “He really likes listening to music … And he actually admitted to me that he listens to the music very loud to drown out the voices.
“He admits to hearing the voices during the time period of the incident, that time frame.”
That “incident” was Leiby’s abduction off of a Borough Park street after the boy got lost walking alone for the first time from day camp to meet his mom.
Aron, 35, has told cops he offered Leiby a ride and then took the child to his Kensington home. Aron confessed to suffocating the boy the next night, and then dismembering him when he realized that a horde of volunteers were searching for Leiby.
Cops found Leiby’s feet in Aron’s freezer — and he directed them to where the rest of the boy’s body could be found, in a Dumpter 2 miles away.
“Certainly, the allegations do not get any worse than this. This allegations are horrific in nature,” Marrone said. “My heart goes out to the victim, the victim’s family. But we have a job to do. Every person in the United States has a right to a defense.”
When Marrone and Bazile met with Aron today, the accused killer was brought to them “under very heavy guard,” wearing light-blue pajamas and “only wearing socks,” Marrone said.
“He seemed distraught, he certainly seemed concerned for his own well-being,” the lawyer said.
Aron told the lawyers he had “suffered a skull fracture when he was 10” and otherwise “claimed to have a normal upbringing,” Marrone said. “There’s not tell-tale signs of abuse.”
But the lawyer also said, “It’s very odd the way his mind seems to work.
“He’s very good with dates,” Marrone noted. “He knows the date of the accident … [But] he can’t tell me what the doctors diagnosed him with.”
Marrone said Aron was incapable of telling a story in a linear, narrative fashion but would become “introverted and disconnected” when the lawyers asked him non-numerical details about events.
“When I asked some pointed questions, he got extremely introverted,” Marrone said. “He got very sheepish when I asked him very specific questions.”
Marrone said Aron’s description of “hearing voices” is “indicative of multiple personalities, that’s indicative or schizophrenia or psychosis.”
“I do feel that he has a diminished capacity. He certainly has some cognitive incapacity as well,” Marrone said.
Aron is currently undergoing a psychiatric evaluation that will conclude whether he is competent to stand trial.
Marrone noted that “it’s a low threshold” to find someone mentally competent to stand trial.
“If he’s found fit, then the case goes forward,” Marrone said.
Asked if Aron would be pleading not guilty by reason of mental disease or deficency, Bazile said, “There’s a serious possibility that that is going to be the road we’re going to be traveling on.
“It would be very difficult to imagine that someone accused of this type of conduct . . . that there wouldn’t be some type of imbalance,” Bazile said.
The boy’s murder shocked the nation.
Mourners from throughout the tristate region have flocked to the family’s home to console the boy’s parents.
Today, a contingent from Lakewood, NJ, which has a large Hasidic community, arrived at the residence.
“This is not just a Borough Park tragedy, it’s one for the entire community,” said Lakewood Mayor Menashe Miller outside Leiby’s parents’ home.
Rabbi Joseph Potasnik of the New York Board of Rabbis said Leiby’s father, Nachman, spoke to visitors about his son’s generous heart.
“Here’s a father in the throes of a horrific tragedy, able to look back and reclaim the light that shone in his life for such a short while,” Potasnik said.
Additional reporting by Lisa Riordan-Seville, David Seifman and Hannah Rappaleye