Death of Zac Brettler

Zac Brettler, born Zachary Josh Brettler, was a 19 year old Londoner who died after falling from the fifth floor balcony of a luxury riverside apartment in the early hours of 29 November 2019. He grew up in Maida Vale in a comfortable Jewish family, the grandson of the prominent rabbi Hugo Gryn, and was educated at Mill Hill School. By every outward measure he was an unremarkable teenager approaching adulthood, but after his death his parents and the police discovered that he had spent his final months living a second life.

In the months before he died, Brettler had reinvented himself as Zac Ismailov, presenting himself to a circle of older, wealthy men as the son of a fictitious Russian billionaire who stood to inherit a fortune reported at around 270 million US dollars. Through this invented persona he gained entry to a world of London men with murky reputations, including a gangster known as Indian Dave Sharma, in whose riverside flat he was staying, and a businessman named Akbar Shamji, co founder of the fashion label SAFiYAA. Both men had spent time with Brettler on the night he died.

Brettler's death mattered because of how it exposed the ease with which a teenager could invent an entirely false identity and be absorbed into a dangerous adult world without his family's knowledge, and because of the troubling, unresolved questions the case raised about the people around him and about the police response that followed. CCTV from the MI6 building across the River Thames recorded him alone on the balcony before he jumped, but a pathologist later found a broken jaw that could not be explained by the fall itself, and Sharma gave almost no answers to investigators.

Brettler died in the early hours of 29 November 2019 after plunging from the balcony of a Millbank area riverside apartment owned by a Saudi princess and occupied by Sharma. His body was found on the river foreshore later that morning. An inquest held in December 2022 returned an open verdict, meaning the coroner's court could not determine with certainty how or why he came to fall. Sharma himself died in December 2020 of a drug overdose, after a previous attempt weeks earlier, while the investigation into Brettler's death stalled amid acknowledged police errors.

The case drew little public attention at the time, but became widely known after journalist Patrick Radden Keefe wrote about it for The New Yorker in 2024, prompting renewed scrutiny of the investigation and of the men Brettler had spent his final hours with. Keefe expanded that reporting into a full length book, published in 2026, that returned the case to public conversation and brought fresh attention to the questions the Brettler family has continued to raise about their son's death.