David Friedman peered down the block where a little lost boy breathed his last breath, and said out loud what everyone else had only been thinking.
“He’s a Jew,” Friedman said yesterday of Levi Aron, the man accused of murdering an 8-year-old boy before chopping up the body and putting the child’s feet in his freezer.
“How could he have such cold blood?”
It was a universally shared sentiment from every sidewalk and stoop in Brooklyn.
But, as it turned out, it was only the second most common question.
The first was, “Why?”
It was the question the crossing guard asked as she stopped traffic for a father crossing McDonald Avenue with his baby boy.
It was the question the librarian at the Middleton branch had as she told the girls upstairs to keep the noise down.
It was the question on the lips of a crime-scene investigator who was pretty sure he had seen just about everything.
And it’s the question that haunts Gidaliy Kvasha when he thinks of all the times he walked by the monster’s house.
Kvasha, a musician, still has posters of little Leiby Kletzky in his car. He grabbed a pile of them when he went out searching for the boy.
Kvasha said he used to see the suspect in the neighborhood, at the synagogue. He knew nothing of the “voices” the man has said were screaming in his head.
“I never knew we had someone like that a block away,” Kvasha said. “A monster. There are a lot of things that happen in the world today. But how can you kill a child? I still can’t get it through my head.”
Life hasn’t returned to normal in the neighborhood where Leiby lived, but life is moving on. The crowds that clustered outside the Kletzky home are gone. The sharp, searing pain is more like an ache.
Talk has turned to security and what parents can do keep their children safe.
A group of community leaders met yesterday to discuss a plan for more surveillance cameras. It was a locksmith’s surveillance video that gave detectives their first clue about the kidnapping.
“Without the cameras, there would never have been an end to this story,” one prominent rabbi said.
Privacy issues aside, the crusade for more cameras on the streets will be an easy one. Whatever it takes to keep the kids safe in a cruel and ugly world.
Not so easy is the question that few parents are ready to answer: When is my little boy ready to walk home by himself?
“We’re telling the kids not to go in anyone’s vehicle,” Friedman said.
“I told my boy if he gets lost, go to a female. Look for a woman with kids. She will help you.”
Parents lose a piece of themselves when they tell their children not to trust. It’s like telling them that a relative died or that there is evil in the world.
But sons and daughters have the same questions. They want to know why, too.
“Why is not important,” said Shmuel Eckstein, 44, a friend of Leiby’s father. “Where does that question start?
“Where does it end? We have to be able to live. We have to move on. If we don’t continue living, they win.”