The Brooklyn resident who died trying to rescue his pets from his flooded basement is the notorious “Torah Man” – who once turned heads for wearing a bizarre outfit made entirely of religious texts to court, The Post has learned.
Aaron Akaberi, 39 — who donned the strange garb while appearing in Brooklyn Supreme Court on drug charges in 2016 — died a hero Thursday while trying to save his dogs and cats from his storm-soaked Flatbush home, neighbors said.
“He had his whatever reputation, but he also saved his dog, that’s how he died,” neighbor Julia Tall, 20, told The Post Friday.
“He had a heart.”
Neighbors remembered Akaberi as an eccentric man and “friend of the community” who only moved into the Kingston Avenue basement dwelling last month — after initially living in a tent behind the building over the summer.
“He’s been in this community since I’ve been younger,” said one of Akaberi’s friends, who only identified himself as Joe. “He was just friends with people that I knew. When he first came to Crown Heights, nobody was saying bad things about him.”
But now, “there’s a lot of people saying all kinds of things” about Akaberi, his pal said.
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.
It included a “shirt” fashioned from newsprint pages covered in the holy Hebrew writings of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson – and a hat made from a print-out of the original seven commandments given to Noah.
Akaberi wore the outlandish outfit as apparent retaliation because he was banned from reading Talmudic quotations at a pre-trial hearing.
“The Judge wouldn’t let me read my ‘Chayenu’ in court, so I decided to wear it,” a defiant Akaberi, who was 30 at the time, said in the downtown Brooklyn courthouse.
The outfit, apparently, wasn’t an act, as he was was well known in the area for his religious faith.
“He was a devout Jew,” Joe said. “He didn’t want to leave the area . . . He didn’t want to leave because he was devoted to the religion and the Rabbi.”
Joe described his friend as ba’al teshuva – which refers to secular Jews who return to religious Judaism.
“Me and him, we would discuss it – like, he would do as best he can to do moral things, the moral mitzvot, the things that are moral commandments,” Joe said. “He was Chabad.”
“He did as best he can,” the friend added. “If anybody told him a Jewish law, he would look it up and find out as fast as he can to keep it.”
On Friday afternoon, at least four chickens wandered around Akaberi’s backyard, and a dead chicken could be seen hanging from the basement ceiling.
He brought the chickens home just after Yom Kippur, his friend said.
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.
His neighbors had warned him that it was too risky to go back inside – pleas that he ignored, they said.
“I was like ‘Don’t go, Aaron! You saved one of the dogs already. Leave, don’t go back down there,’ and he pushed me out the way and went down there,” a female neighbor said.
“I don’t see him coming up,” she recalled. “When he went down there, I didn’t see him come out [from the back] and I lift up the window and say ‘Aaron, Aaron?’ and I don’t see him down there. I thought he might have came out the back, but he didn’t, he was trapped down there.”
Video captured by a passerby showed the FDNY and members of the scuba team carrying the victim’s limp body out of the apartment building while they were still wading through ankle-high water in the street.
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.
Montoya Hernandez did odd jobs for the building super, a building tenant said Friday.
“There was a loose wire in the water and he was electrocuted,” the tenant said. “I feel terrible. We never had any ill wish towards him. We never wanted anything bad to happen to him.”
When reached by The Post, the super, Milton Mora, said Montoya Hernandez “was not supposed to be there.”
“I went to the boiler room. The water was up to my knees,” he recalled. “He was dead already when I walked in. I tried to pull him out. I got electrocuted, too. I’m lucky I’m alive….I don’t know how.”
“He was a friend of mine,” Mora added. “I loved him like a brother. He was like family to me. He was a good person. Everybody loved him. He helped everybody.”
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