Andy Saw Aaron Smith-Levin’s Violent Extremes, Had to Pull Him off a Colleague

Another of Smith-Levin’s former colleagues, Andy, recounts his extremes of violence—requiring restraint by colleagues—that led up to his dismissal.

TRANSCRIPT:

I worked with Aaron Smith-Levin back in 2003. My experience with him is that if there was ever a difficulty he ran into while being on the job, his solution to it was anger or violence or physically attacking other co-workers or even superiors.

Walking down the hallway, his facial expressions, he was mad about something. He was somebody that you wanted to keep your distance from and you didn’t want to deal with or interact with. But because of what he was doing, he had to deal with a lot of other co-workers and there was numerous times where he would get into arguments or fights. And you could hear it, reverberating down the hallways.

Aaron shared an office with another co-worker. And Aaron’s a big guy, he’s a big build, big stature. The co-worker was much smaller than Aaron. And at one point there was a conflict over the office. And what happened—Aaron physically attacked that co-worker. And it wasn’t—it was Aaron coming at him, grabbing him, getting on top of him. I happened to be there and stopped it. And I had to physically pull Aaron off of him to prevent it from getting any worse than it was. But that was an example of how he dealt with situations and people in life.

But he would specifically do it with people who are smaller than him who are lower in rank or in stature than him: females, teenagers and it wasn’t anybody of a larger status or anything like that. And it’s just—it’s wrong and it is, it’s bullying. He actually would bully people, bully people that he was bigger than, bully people that he was—had more authority or power over, in his mind. And that’s—that’s what he would do.

In working with Aaron we would do things to help him because we wanted him, you know, we wanted to help him through whatever difficulty it was he was having in dealing with people so that he could be a contributive, productive individual at his job. And after numerous attempts to, like, sort things out or resolve things or handle whatever difficult he was running into, it just wasn’t tolerated anymore at that point. He just could not be a part of the team because he wouldn’t—he wouldn’t reciprocate in that manner. He wouldn’t reciprocate—he wouldn’t be a team member or a group member or participate in the goals and purposes of what we’re trying to achieve. He was just angry.