An intense search for the missing 8-year-old, Leiby Kletzky, ended early Wednesday morning with the gruesome discovery of pieces of his dismembered body inside the home.
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said the 35-year-old suspect, Levi Aron, made statements implicating himself in the boy's death.
Investigators tracked Aron with the help of surveillance video that showed him being approached by the lost boy.
When detectives arrived at the man's home, they asked him where the boy was and he nodded toward the kitchen, Kelly told.
Detectives saw blood on the freezer door and they opened it to discover bloody knives, a cutting board and feet inside, according to a law enforcement official who spoke to The Associated Press on condition.
Additional body parts were found inside a red suitcase that had been tossed into a trash bin in another Brooklyn neighborhood.
Police and volunteers had been looking since late Monday afternoon for Leiby, who disappeared while on his way to meet his mother in the Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Borough Park.
The break in the case came when investigators focused on a grainy surveillance video that showed the boy, wearing his backpack, walking down the street, while a man walked nearby.
Detectives noticed the man on the video going into a nearby dentist's office, Browne said. The dentist, located later in New Jersey, said he remembered someone coming by to pay a bill for a patient, and police were able to identify Aron using records from the office. When they went to his home, they build the awesome discovery.
Police said Aron lives alone in the apartment, in a building shared with his father and mother. He once had a summons for urinating in public but otherwise did not have a criminal record, Kelly said.
