On May 30, 1997, late in the afternoon, Jonathan Levin, a beloved English teacher at a Bronx high school, answered a phone call from Corey Arthur, a former student whose mentor he had been. Arthur pled with him: "I need to see you. It's important." As court records and testimony show, Levin responded to Arthur's plea by inviting him to come to his apartment. When Levin opened his door, however, he found not only Arthur but also another young man, Montoun Hart. Jon Levin's tortured and partially decomposed body was found three days later.
According to Hart's 11-page confession, he and Arthur misled Levin in order to gain access to his apartment. They then tortured him to make him tell them the PIN for his ATM card.
According to Hart, Levin asked, in the final moments of his life, "Why are you doing this to me?" The young men stabbed him in the chest and the back of the neck; they then pulled his head back and cut his throat three times before shooting him in the back of the head with a .22 caliber pistol. They then went to an ATM near his home and withdrew $800.
Jon Levin was the son of Gerald Levin, then the chief executive officer of media conglomerate Time Warner. Jon had made a decision not to follow his father into corporate America. Instead, he had dedicated his life to helping the disadvantaged and had become a teacher at an inner-city school where most of the kids were poor and black. His payback was brutal.
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