{"id":24696,"date":"2025-10-31T23:04:21","date_gmt":"2025-10-31T23:04:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/24696\/"},"modified":"2025-10-31T23:04:21","modified_gmt":"2025-10-31T23:04:21","slug":"nyc-resident-who-died-saving-pets-from-flooded-basement-is-torah-man-who-wore-bizarre-religious-get-up-to-court","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/24696\/","title":{"rendered":"NYC resident who died saving pets from flooded basement is ‘Torah Man’ who wore bizarre religious get-up to court"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Brooklyn resident who died trying to rescue his pets<\/a> from his flooded basement is the notorious \u201cTorah Man\u201d \u2013 who once turned heads for wearing a bizarre outfit made entirely of religious texts to court, The Post has learned.<\/p>\n

Aaron Akaberi, 39 \u2014 who donned the strange garb<\/a> while appearing in Brooklyn Supreme Court on drug charges in 2016 \u2014 died a hero Thursday while trying to save his dogs and cats from his storm-soaked Flatbush home, neighbors said.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe had his whatever reputation, but he also saved his dog, that\u2019s how he died,\u201d neighbor Julia Tall, 20, told The Post Friday. <\/p>\n

Aaron Akaberi, 39, who once wore a Torah-inspired handmade get-up to a Supreme Court appearance, died while trying to retrieve his dog and cat from his flood-ravaged Brooklyn basement. Stefan Jeremiah<\/p>\n

\u201cHe had a heart.\u201d<\/p>\n

Neighbors remembered Akaberi as an eccentric man and \u201cfriend of the community\u201d who only moved into the Kingston Avenue basement dwelling last month \u2014 after initially living in a tent behind the building over the summer.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s been in this community since I\u2019ve been younger,\u201d said one of Akaberi\u2019s friends, who only identified himself as Joe. \u201cHe was just friends with people that I knew. When he first came to Crown Heights, nobody was saying bad things about him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Akaberi wore the bizarre outfit because he was banned from reading Talmudic quotations at a pre-trial hearing.\u00a0 Stefan Jeremiah<\/p>\n

But now, \u201cthere\u2019s a lot of people saying all kinds of things\u201d about Akaberi, his pal said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Akaberi, in part, got people talking about him, because of his stunt a decade ago, in which he wore his outlandish get-up to Brooklyn court. <\/p>\n

It included a \u201cshirt\u201d fashioned from newsprint pages covered in the holy Hebrew writings of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson \u2013 and a hat made from a print-out of the original seven commandments given to Noah.<\/p>\n

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Akaberi wore the outlandish outfit as apparent retaliation because he was banned from reading Talmudic quotations at a pre-trial hearing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Judge wouldn\u2019t let me read my \u2018Chayenu\u2019 in court, so I decided to wear it,\u201d a defiant Akaberi, who was 30 at the time, said in the downtown Brooklyn courthouse.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The outfit, apparently, wasn\u2019t an act, as he was was well known in the area for his religious faith. <\/p>\n

\u201cHe was a devout Jew,\u201d Joe said. \u201cHe didn\u2019t want to leave the area . . . He didn\u2019t want to leave because he was devoted to the religion and the Rabbi.\u201d<\/p>\n

Akaberi ignored his neighbor\u2019s pleas and went back into his flooded basement because his dog and cat were still trapped inside. Brigitte Stelzer<\/p>\n

Joe described his friend as ba\u2019al teshuva \u2013 which refers to secular Jews who return to religious Judaism.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cMe and him, we would discuss it \u2013 like, he would do as best he can to do moral things, the moral mitzvot, the things that are moral commandments,\u201d Joe said. \u201cHe was Chabad.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cHe did as best he can,\u201d the friend added. \u201cIf anybody told him a Jewish law, he would look it up and find out as fast as he can to keep it.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Friday afternoon, at least four chickens wandered around Akaberi\u2019s backyard, and a dead chicken could be seen hanging from the basement ceiling.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Neighbors remembered Akaberi as an eccentric man and \u201cfriend of the community\u201d Brigitte Stelzer<\/p>\n

He brought the chickens home just after Yom Kippur, his friend said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As torrential rains pounded the Big Apple Thursday, Akaberi initially made it out of the basement clutching his mastiff Luna and cat Sparky, but made a beeline back inside to rescue his bully mix, Yala, and cat, Chuki.\u00a0<\/p>\n

His neighbors had warned him that it was too risky to go back inside \u2013 pleas that he ignored, they said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI was like \u2018Don\u2019t go, Aaron! You saved one of the dogs already. Leave, don\u2019t go back down there,\u2019 and he pushed me out the way and went down there,\u201d a female neighbor said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Akaberi managed to save his dog, Luna (pictured), but another dog, Yala, died alongside him. Julia Tal<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t see him coming up,\u201d she recalled. \u201cWhen he went down there, I didn\u2019t see him come out [from the back] and I lift up the window and say \u2018Aaron, Aaron?\u2019 and I don\u2019t see him down there. I thought he might have came out the back, but he didn\u2019t, he was trapped down there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Video captured by a passerby showed the FDNY and members of the scuba team carrying the victim\u2019s limp body out of the apartment building while they were still wading through ankle-high water in the street.<\/p>\n

About 30 minutes after Akaberi was pulled from the flooded basement, Juan Carlos Montoya Hernandez, 43, was also found unresponsive inside a flooded boiler room on West 175th Street in Washington Heights, police said.<\/p>\n

Akaberi\u2019s cat Sparky also survived, but his other feline companion Chuki did not. Brigitte Stelzer<\/p>\n

Montoya Hernandez did odd jobs for the building super, a building tenant said Friday.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a loose wire in the water and he was electrocuted,\u201d the tenant said. \u201cI feel terrible. We never had any ill wish towards him. We never wanted anything bad to happen to him.\u201d<\/p>\n

When reached by The Post, the super, Milton Mora, said Montoya Hernandez \u201cwas not supposed to be there.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI went to the boiler room. The water was up to my knees,\u201d he recalled. \u201cHe was dead already when I walked in. I tried to pull him out. I got electrocuted, too. I\u2019m lucky I\u2019m alive\u2026.I don\u2019t know how.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was a friend of mine,\u201d Mora added. \u201cI loved him like a brother. He was like family to me. He was a good person. Everybody loved him. He helped everybody.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Brooklyn resident who died trying to rescue his pets from his flooded basement is the notorious \u201cTorah…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":24697,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[98,1873,900,7702,9,56,63,65,64,2973,58],"class_list":{"0":"post-24696","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york-city","8":"tag-brooklyn","9":"tag-flatbush","10":"tag-floods","11":"tag-judaism","12":"tag-new-york","13":"tag-ny","14":"tag-nyc","15":"tag-nyc-headlines","16":"tag-nyc-news","17":"tag-supreme-court","18":"tag-us-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24696\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}