NEW YORK CITY , NY - On Thursday, Mirzo Atadzhanov, 32, was sentenced by Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Danny Chun to 22 years to life in prison, after pleading guilty to first-degree murder in the stabbing death of a 66-year-old professor.
The victim, Jeremy Safran, was working-out inside his Brooklyn home, when Atadzhanov broke in through a window and killed him in a frenzied attack.
In a news release, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office stated:
The District Attorney said that, according to the investigation, on May 7, 2018, just before 6 p.m., the victim’s wife placed a 911 call and, when police responded, officers discovered the victim, 66-year-old Jeremy Safran, in the basement of his Prospect Park South home. The victim was stabbed twice in the chest and three times in the stomach. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
The defendant, who broke into the basement and stabbed the victim, was discovered hiding in a closet in the basement. The knife used in the stabbing was subsequently recovered from the trunk of the defendant’s car, according to the evidence.
A blood soaked hammer was also found lying next to the victim’s body.
Police and prosecutors could never determine a motive and characterized the murder as a “random attack.”
At the time he was killed, Jeremy Safran was a professor at New School for Social Research in Manhattan, a Senior Research Scientist at Mount Sinai Beth Israel Medical Center and a teacher at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. In all, Saffran spent 36 years both treating patients and teaching, according to his obituary.
Saffran left a wife and two daughters behind.
*Atadzhanov came to this country from Tajikistan, and was charged with attempted rape in 2016.
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