Sentence in ‘Ziggy’ death
Smiley gets 32 years in slaying of Zyszkiewicz
Last defendant in the slaying of city inspector Gregory Zyszkiewicz gets 32 years.
A 23-year-old man was sentenced Friday to 32 years in prison for his role in the 2017 shotgun slaying of a Milwaukee building inspector.
Eric Smiley is the last of three men sentenced for the murder of Greg “Ziggy” Zyszkiewicz, who was shot in his Ford Mustang on March 22, 2017, while working on Milwaukee’s north side.
While Smiley was not the shooter in the murder and failed carjacking, prosecutors said that as the oldest member of the group, he was likely acting as the ringleader.
Olha Zyszkiewicz, Zyszkiewicz’s wife, told Smiley that she had written pages of what she would like to tell him but that the drawnout process left her emotionally exhausted.
“To tell you about Greg and the man he was, what he meant to his family, his friends, his co-workers would be pointless,” Olha Zyszkiewicz said. “I don’t think you have the ability to understand the enormity of our loss.”
For Heather Zyszkiewicz Sharafinski, who is 36 weeks pregnant with her third child, her father’s murder turned what should have been one of the happiest periods of her life into a nightmare. None of her children is old enough to have gotten to know their grandfather.
Smiley’s relatives also made statements to the court offering their condolences to Zyszkiewicz’s family and asked the judge for leniency.
Smiley told the Zyszkiewicz family that he was sincerely sorry and that he understood he would never be able to give back what he had taken from them. On the day of the murder, Smiley said he had shown poor judgment but told the judge his actions did not reflect his true character.
Judge David Borowski said the murder was a case of good vs. evil in which a city official who was doing his job encountered three individuals acting on purely selfish motives.
Zyszkiewicz was on duty with the Milwaukee Department of Neighborhood Services and parked his vintage Ford Mustang near North 23rd and West Cherry streets when Smiley, Qhualun D. Shaw, and Deshaun K. Scott targeted him for a carjacking. Zyszkiewicz was
shot with a sawed-off shotgun.
“Mr. Scott, Mr. Shaw and this defendant were participating in turning Milwaukee into a hellhole,” Borowski said.
When Borowski heard about the case in 2017, he said he hoped the murder would spark some change in Milwaukee. Since then, the city has only gotten worse, he said. Four police officers and dozens of civilians have been killed since the Zyszkiewicz murder.
“We kill people in this community over nothing: cars, jackets, shoes, someone walked on my alley, someone looked at me cross-eyed,” said Borowski. “This community needs to wake up.”
Borowski also showed in court a photo of Zyszkiewicz’s grandchildren at the victim’s grave.
In his statements before the delivery of the sentence, Borowski also read a quote from one of Zyszkiewicz’s colleagues: “He loved the city that killed him.”