Intruder Charged in Killing of New School Professor in Brooklyn Home

NEW YORK — A professor of psychology at the New School for Social Research was found dead in the basement of his Brooklyn home on Monday night, and officers arrested a man hiding in a closet on a murder charge, the police said.

The officers were responding to a 911 call of a burglary at the two-story home of the professor, Jeremy Safran, in the Prospect Park South neighborhood at about 6 p.m. They found Safran, 66, unconscious in the basement with severe wounds to his head and body, a bloody hammer lying nearby, the police said. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

Searching the basement, the police discovered a 28-year-old man, Mirzo Atadzhanov, inside a closet. He was charged with murder and burglary.

Dermot Shea, the New York Police Department chief of detectives, said at a news conference on Tuesday the police were still trying to discern a motive for the killing. It was unclear if Atadzhanov knew Safran.

Atadzhanov, who has a degree in biology from Brooklyn College, had been arrested in 2016 and charged with attempted rape and other felonies after a female tourist who had arranged to sleep on his couch through the website couchsurfing.com said he had assaulted her. The charges were dismissed at his arraignment, the New York Daily News reported.

Safran’s wife, Jennifer Hunter, works in the student counseling center at Brooklyn College. She and the couple’s two daughters, Ayla and Ellie, were not at home at the time of the killing, police said.

Well-known and admired in his field, Safran was an expert in cognitive-behavioral therapy and was one of the pioneers in the field of emotion-focused therapy, a psychotherapeutic approach to individual and couples therapy.

He wrote or edited eight books, including one on Buddhism, said Howard Steele, a first cousin who is also a psychology professor at the New School. Safran was also a faculty member of the postdoctoral program in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis at New York University.

Steele estimated that during a quarter-century at the New School, Safran had taught more than 400 students who hoped to become clinical psychologists. “Even though he will no longer be physically part of our faculty, we will have people that carry within them the unique clinical expertise taught to them by Jeremy Safran,” he said in a phone interview.

Safran was born in Calgary, Canada, and brought up in deeply religious Jewish family, Steele said. He was 12 when his father died.

When he graduated high school, Safran was still debating whether to attend college, so he lived for a year with Steele’s family in Vancouver, and Steele’s father got Safran a job as a plasterer.

“He would come home covered in white dust and at the end of that year he decided to go to university,” Steele said.

Safran joined the New School faculty in 1993 at a time the clinical psychology program had been placed on probation. Under his leadership, and with his “characteristic energy and determination,” Safran led the program to full accreditation, Steele and Bill Hirst, the current chairs of the psychology department, wrote in an email sent to the students and faculty.

Safran practiced Buddhism and engaged in mindfulness meditation “before the practice became widespread,” Steele said.

“His greatest love was his family,” Steele said. “He told me that his best time in his life is when his girls were small and everyone felt so safe,” he said. “I stumble on that last word because of the way his life was ended.”

On Tuesday afternoon, neighbors eyed the caution tape outside of the Safran house on Stratford Road. Police officers could be seen entering and exiting the two-story brown house, with its shaded porch swing out front.

Staring at the yellow tape, Josh Lomask, a neighbor, shook his head. He called the incident a “horror show” that was not entirely unbelievable.

“I don’t think anyone expects it on their block, but it’s New York City,” Lomask, 48, said. “It’s Brooklyn, and we often forget that, no matter how much it changes.”