Five people have been arrested by the Greek authorities in the July 4 killing of a well-known University of California, Berkeley, professor, including his ex-wife and her current boyfriend, the police said.
The suspects made their first appearance in court on Thursday on charges of intentional homicide in the shooting of Przemyslaw Jeziorski, 43, who taught quantitative marketing at the Haas School of Business.
The police did not name any of the suspects, including Mr. Jeziorski’s ex-wife, whose lawyer, Alexandros Pasiatas, told the Greek news media that his client had no involvement in the killing. He also denied that the former spouses were having custody issues.
Mr. Pasiatas did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday. Neither did Ermis Papoutsis, a lawyer for the ex-wife’s boyfriend, who told reporters in Greece that his client had “accepted responsibility” for the killing, without elaborating.
While visiting Agia Paraskevi, a northern suburb of Athens, Mr. Jeziorski, who was born in Poland and was known as Przemek, was approached by an attacker during the afternoon on July 4 and was shot in the chest and back, the Greek police said.
At the time of his death, Mr. Jeziorski was seeing his two young children and making legal arrangements for future visitation, something his ex-wife, who is Greek, had tried unsuccessfully to block him from doing, officials said.
In May, Mr. Jeziorski applied for a restraining order against his ex-wife, according to records filed in Superior Court in Alameda County, Calif. In his request, which was reported by The San Francisco Chronicle, he accused his ex-wife of making threats and of attempted extortion. He also said that her boyfriend had assaulted him twice while he was visiting his children in suburban Athens.
The five suspects were taken into custody on Wednesday, according to the police, who said that the attack had been instigated by Mr. Jeziorski’s ex-wife, 40, and was carried out by her boyfriend, 35, who is also Greek.
Among the five were three accomplices whom the authorities identified as two Albanian nationals, who are 24 and 16, and one Bulgarian, who is 30.
Mr. Jeziorski and his ex-wife appeared to have had “major financial differences” over companies they owned in the United States and over custody of their children, Constantina Dimoglidou, a spokeswoman for the Greek police, said on Thursday.
According to investigators, Mr. Jeziorski’s killer gave his car keys and phone to one of the accomplices to avoid being detected.
Mr. Jeziorski’s colleagues and students at U.C. Berkeley remembered him as a leading expert in quantitative marketing, industrial organization and the economics of digital markets. In his 13 years at Berkeley, where he was a tenured associate professor, Mr. Jeziorski taught data analytics to more than 1,500 M.B.A. and Ph.D. students, according to the university.
One of them was Lawrence Tan, an evening and weekend M.B.A. student, who paid tribute to Mr. Jeziorski on the university’s website.
“From day one, I remember thinking to myself, ‘Wow, if every lecture is like this, I’m going to learn a ton in this course,” Mr. Tan wrote. “It was, and I did.”
Mr. Jeziorski grew up in Gdynia, a city in northern Poland on the Baltic Sea, according to the university.
After graduating from secondary school in 2001, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in quantitative methods and information systems from the Warsaw School of Economics.
He moved to the United States to continue his education, earning two more master’s degrees from the University of Arizona before he was accepted to the doctoral program in economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
“He was extremely technically talented and hardworking,” Lanier Benkard, a Stanford professor who was Mr. Jeziorski’s adviser, said in an online tribute. “Things that were hard for most people were easy for him.”
At Berkeley, Mr. Jeziorski took particular interest in financial inclusion and traveled to Africa and India to get firsthand experience with the data that he had been working with, according to the university.
His brother, Lukasz Jeziorski, was raising money online to return Mr. Jeziorski’s remains to Poland and for legal fees. The effort had raised more than 55,000 euros, or nearly $64,000, as of Thursday.
“Our family is heartbroken,” his brother wrote on an online fund-raising site, “and we are doing everything we can to ensure that justice is served.”
Neil Vigdor covers breaking news for The Times, with a focus on politics.
Niki Kitsantonis is a freelance correspondent for The Times based in Athens. She has been writing about Greece for 20 years, including more than a decade of coverage for The Times.
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