A Murdered Professor’s House.
Squatters Moved In.
California Won’t Move Them Out.
Przemyslaw Jeziorski was a UC Berkeley professor, a father of eleven-year-old twins, and — according to Greek police — the target of a contract killing arranged during a custody fight. He was shot dead in an Athens suburb on July 4, 2025. While his family buried him and took in his children, a different group of people let themselves into his Berkeley home and refused to leave.
The occupants told a court they signed a one-year lease with Jeziorski’s ex-wife and paid $30,000up front. The family’s attorney says that is impossible: the ex-wife was jailed in Greece over the murder before she could have signed anything, and she has since died in custody. No lease and no proof of payment have been produced.
And yet, in California, that thin claim is enough. Because the occupants have been inside for months, police treat the dispute as a civil matter, and the family must sue for eviction — a process the state’s own courts warn can drag on. This is what accountability looks like when the law is written to make removal slow, in a state run top to bottom by Democrats.
- 43years oldPrzemyslaw Jeziorski, shot at close range in a suburb of Athens, July 4, 2025 — CNN
- $30Kclaimedup-front payment the occupants say they made on a lease the family calls impossible — NBC Bay Area
- 11year-old twinsthe professor's now-orphaned children, set to inherit the Berkeley home — ABC7
- 5chargedsuspects in the Greece killing, including the ex-wife, who later died in custody — Oxygen
- Monthsto evicthow long the family's lawyer says California's civil eviction process could take — NBC Bay Area
The house sits in Berkeley, in Alameda County. Before Przemyslaw Jeziorski was killed, it had been used as a short-term Airbnb rental. After his death, it was supposed to sit empty until his estate settled and his children inherited it. Instead, according to his family, strangers moved in and treated it as their own.
In December 2025, Berkeley police responding to the property found signs of a break-in and possible squatting, according to reporting by NBC Bay Area. The occupants stayed. In the months since, the family says, the people inside have been selling belongings out of the home — and neighbors told reporters they had seen items from the house turning up at yard sales.
The professor’s brother, Lukasz Jeziorski, is now raising the murdered man’s eleven-year-old twins and paying the mortgage on a home he cannot enter. His verdict on the people inside is blunt.
“They are stealing from the two orphans.”
Lukasz Jeziorski, the professor's brother · NBC Bay Area, 2026
Squatters have taken over the home of a slain UC Berkeley professor, his family says — and California's eviction process is making them nearly impossible to remove.
To understand why the house sat vulnerable, start with what happened in Greece. Przemyslaw Jeziorski, 43, was an economist and marketing professor at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. On July 4, 2025, he was shot multiple times at close range in Agia Paraskevi, a suburb of Athens, where he had traveled to see his children and attend a custody hearing, according to CNN and Greek authorities.
Greek police arrested five people, including Jeziorski’s ex-wife, Nadia Michelidaki, whom investigators accused of orchestrating the killing, and her boyfriend, Christos Dounias. According to CNN, which reviewed a leaked police confession, Dounias admitted to the shooting and said he “did it all for” Michelidaki; his attorney said only that his client “accepted responsibility.” One of those arrested was a minor. The surviving suspects are presumed innocent and await trial.
It was not the first warning sign. Months before he was killed, Jeziorski had told a court he was afraid of his ex-wife, describing threats and financial coercion and seeking a restraining order that said she had made him “fearful” for his life, ABC7 reported. In May 2026, Michelidaki died by suicide in a Greek prison while awaiting trial — which matters here for a specific reason: the record shows she was jailed in Greece for months before her death, so she could not have signed a Berkeley lease during that window.
The ex-wife of a slain UC Berkeley professor orchestrated his killing in Greece, police say, in the middle of a custody battle over the couple's twins.
The occupants’ defense rests on a single document that, so far, no one has seen. In court records, they claim they signed a one-year lease with Jeziorski’s ex-wife and paid $30,000 up front. That claim is what converts a break-in into a landlord-tenant dispute — and pushes the family out of the criminal-trespass lane and into the slow machinery of civil eviction.
The family’s attorney, Erinne Stratte, says the lease story falls apart on the timeline. Michelidaki was in a Greek prison, charged in her ex-husband’s murder, during the period the lease was supposedly signed. Stratte told NBC Bay Area that the occupants have produced no proof of a lease and no proof of payment, and that police reports show conflicting accounts of when they even moved in.
“They have no lease, no proof of payment, and their own accounts of when they arrived don't match. And still the family has to go to court to get its own house back.”
Summary of the family attorney's position, per NBC Bay Area reporting
Meanwhile, the family alleges, the dead man’s property is being sold off piece by piece. That is the core injustice the New York Post captured in its July 3 headline: brazen squatters infiltrating the house of a murdered professor while his mourning family watches and pays the bills. Nobody has produced a lease. Nobody disputes he was murdered. And the house is still occupied.
Brazen squatters infiltrate house of murdered Bay Area professor, mourning family says.
Here is the part that infuriates people who read the story: the family is right, and it still does not matter fast enough. California draws a hard line between a trespasser, whom police can remove, and a tenant, whom only a court can evict — and the line is easy to cross by simply staying. Once occupants have been in a home for a stretch of time (roughly a month is the figure commonly cited) and assert that they live there, officers routinely decline to make an arrest and tell the owner it is a “civil matter.”
From there the only route is an unlawful-detainer lawsuit — California’s formal eviction process. The owner must serve notice, file suit, wait out the occupants’ response window, and win a court judgment before a sheriff will physically remove anyone. The Judicial Council’s own self-help materials walk owners through a sequence measured in weeks and months, not days. For a grieving family in another country’s legal system, that timeline is the whole problem.
Adverse possession is the doctrine that lets a long-term occupant eventually claim ownership. In California it requires five continuous years of possession and payment of the property taxes (Code of Civil Procedure § 325). The Berkeley occupants are nowhere near that — they cannot win the house. But that is cold comfort, because they do not need to own it to keep living in it while the eviction case crawls forward.
SB 602 (2023) — authored by Sen. Kelly Seyarto (R) and coauthored by Sen. Bob Archuleta (D), signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and effective Jan. 1, 2024 — was a modest fix: it extended the validity of a police trespass-warning letter from 30 days to a full year so owners of empty property need not refile monthly. It does nothing for an owner facing someone already inside who waves a lease. The fast lane closes the moment a lease is claimed.
The result is a system that treats a fabricated lease claim as a valid ticket to months of free occupancy. In the East Bay, the difficulty has become its own cottage industry: Oaklandside profiled a man who charges owners to remove squatters from empty homes because the legal process is so slow that people pay to route around it. That is what a broken statute looks like on the ground — a private market growing up in the gap the law left open.
The rules that trapped this family were not handed down by nature. They were written, and they are enforced, by identifiable people — and in Berkeley and Sacramento, those people are Democrats.
City of Berkeley: Mayor Adena Ishii (D), elected in November 2024 on a promise to “reset” City Hall.
Alameda County DA: progressive prosecutor Pamela Price (D) was recalled by 63% of voters in November 2024 — a deep-blue county’s revolt against the soft-on-enforcement model. Appointee Ursula Jones Dickson then won the June 2, 2026 election outright with roughly 64% to serve out the term.
State of California: Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), Attorney General Rob Bonta (D), and a Democratic supermajority in the Legislature that has built the country’s most occupant-protective body of housing and eviction law.
None of these officials chose the Jeziorski family’s ordeal. But the framework that produced it — expansive tenant protections, a criminal-trespass exit that slams shut the instant someone claims a lease, and years of prosecutorial reluctance that voters themselves rejected when they recalled Price — is a Democratic policy inheritance. When the machinery meant to protect renters from ruthless landlords instead shelters opportunists squatting in a murdered man’s house, the people who built and run that machinery own the outcome.
It is worth stating plainly what tenant protections are for: keeping a working family from being thrown onto the street on a slumlord’s whim is a legitimate, humane goal. The failure here is one of calibration. A statute that cannot tell the difference between a real tenant and a stranger holding no lease, no receipt, and a story that does not survive a calendar check is a statute doing the opposite of its job.
Strip the case to its facts. A UC Berkeley professor was murdered in a plot police say his ex-wife arranged. His eleven-year-old twins are orphans. His brother is raising them and paying the mortgage on the house they are meant to inherit — a house he cannot walk into, because people the family calls squatters are inside selling the dead man’s belongings and pointing to a lease no one can find.
No lease. No receipt. No dispute that the man is dead. And still, under California law, the family waits — while a private market of squatter-removers grows in the gap the statute left open. Reform is not complicated: give owners a fast, evidence-based path to reclaim a home when the “tenant” can produce nothing. The only thing missing is the will of the people who wrote the law.
