The news from Boro Park

I saw the first grim news — a child missing — on Tuesday night, via a Google Alert for boro park. The story began at Twelfth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street, at the school where Leiby Kletzky was attending summer camp. I passed that building hundreds of times as a kid, back when it was an apartment house. I lived on Forty-fourth Street, less than a block away.

The story began with what many parents have experienced, at least briefly — the terrifying feeling of not knowing where a child is. What followed was a horror beyond imagining, born of psychopathy and the haphazard cruelty of circumstance. My heart breaks for the Kletzky family.