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He was just a little boy — but died fighting like a man.
Brave 8-year-old Leiby Kletzky spent his final moments of life in a fierce battle with kidnapper Levi Aron, desperately clawing at the coward suffocating him with a towel, authorities said yesterday.
“There are some scratches on Aron’s arms and wrists,” said Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. “Based on the marks on the defendant . . . There was some struggle. There are marks on his body.”
But the killer kept pressing on the towel until Leiby gave in.
“He fought back a little bit until eventually he stopped breathing,” Aron, 35, allegedly confessed. “Afterwards, I panicked, because I didn’t know what to do with the body.”
Cops said the maniac used three knives and a cutting board to dismember the child in the cramped attic apartment in Brooklyn’s Kensington section.
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“There’s absolutely nothing more innocent than an 8-year-old child. And to be killed in this manner is so disturbing,” Kelly said.
Even hardened criminals agreed with the commissioner, screaming, “You f–king killer!” in Brooklyn Criminal Court before Aron pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and kidnapping charges.
Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes said his office confiscated Aron’s computers and will also investigate whether Aron had previous improper contact with kids here and in Tennessee, where he previously lived.
A disheveled Aron was held without bail and ordered to undergo psychiatric evaluation on Rikers Island after his lawyer told the judge his client “hears voices and suffers from hallucinations.”
Aron has fully confessed, and Kelly said yesterday that cops confirmed his claim that he attended a wedding in Monsey, a heavily Orthodox Jewish town in Rockland County, hours after the abduction.
Police were checking video from 14 cameras at the Ateres Charna catering hall to determine whether Aron was telling the truth about taking Leiby with him.
The wedding of Monsey resident Yakov Morsel and Queens woman Dina Munk was packed with up to 500 guests, many of them kids.
Aron claimed he left the boy briefly in his car, parked outside the hall with the windows rolled down, as he joined the reception, sources said.
The groom’s neighbors said the boy would have stood out at the wedding because he is a Hasid, unlike the majority of guests, who were Orthodox Jews and don’t grow payos, the traditional side curls.
At Aron’s East Second Street home, investigators cleared brush as they prepared to dig up the back yard as early as today.
An NYPD evidence-collection team hauled out bags containing computer hard drives, a mattress and other items as they combed through the three-story Brooklyn house where Aron lived with his dad, stepmom and uncle.
Aron’s lawyer, Pierre Brazile, said after court that his client’s condition was “not good” and offered condolences to Leiby’s family.
The loner — known in his neighborhood as a child-stalker — allegedly snatched Leiby off a street corner Monday during a chance encounter as the boy walked alone from day camp for the first time. Aron claimed Leiby approached him for directions.
“He asked me for a ride to the Judaica bookstore,” Aron confessed. “While on the way, he changed his mind and wasn’t sure he wanted to go.”
Aron told police that he drove Leiby to the wedding, but left early due to back pain and took the boy back to his attic apartment, “thinking I’d bring him to his house the next day.”
He claimed the boy was still sleeping Tuesday morning when he left for his job as a stockboy in a plumbing-supply shop.
Kelly said “it’s possible” that Aron tied up Leiby before he went to work.
“There may be a ligature mark on part of the boy’s body,” he said.
Aron told cops he saw volunteers handing out fliers as he returned home, and “panicked.”
“When I got home, he was still there, so I made him a tuna sandwich,” Aron said. “I was still in a panic . . . and afraid to bring him home.”
That’s when he allegedly decided to kill Leiby to save his own skin.
Aron allegedly dismembered the body, placing Leiby’s feet in garbage bags and putting them in his freezer. He put the rest of the corpse in a suitcase and put it in a Dumpster two miles away.
“Obviously, in this business, you see a lot of violence. There’s usually some sort of irrational, twisted logic that’s given as to why a violent event took place,” Kelly said.
“Here it defies all logic, and I think that’s really what’s so terribly disturbing about this case.”
Additional reporting by Larry Celona, Don Kaplan, Jessica Simeone, Andy Campbell, Maura O’Connor, Jennifer Bain and Reuven Fenton