A Boston University medical student was arraigned on murder and weapons charges Wednesday, with prosecutors alleging he is responsible for a March 2 shooting in Jamaica Plain that left one man dead and another comatose.
Prosecutors claim Daniel Mason, 35, drove to the Jamaica Plain apartment of 28-year-old Gene Yazgur and shot him and his roommate, Michael Lenz, 25, while they slept, though the defendant maintains his innocence and pleaded not guilty last week in Roxbury District Court.
Suffolk County Assistant District Attorney Josh Wall alleged Mason, clad in a black-knit hat, entered the apartment at around 5:30 a.m. on Friday morning toting a 9 mm shotgun he had owned since 1992. His first victim, according to the prosecutor, was Lenz, who he killed by shooting him in the temple.
Mason then allegedly entered Yazgur’s bedroom and shot him in the chin. When Yazgur woke and attempted to escape, Mason fired at his chest, knocking him to the floor, Wall said. Mason, who was reportedly trained as an assassin in the Israeli military, allegedly then shot Yazgur in each leg, breaking both his femurs. Before fleeing the apartment, Mason also fired on Yazgur’s dog Sampson, Wall said.
A past incident may have motivated the attack. Mason was placed on probation after he was convicted of assault stemming from a September 1997 traffic incident occurring after Yazgur reportedly parked his moving truck in a spot where it blocked Mason’s car. When Mason asked Yazgur, then an employee of a moving company, to move the truck, he was reportedly told to wait five minutes.
Instead, Mason reportedly punched Yazgur in the face with an object he drew from his pants pocket, slashing Yazgur’s face.
Following a lawsuit, a judge last August ordered Mason to pay Yazgur more than $118,000 over a 20-year span. That day, according to The Boston Globe, Mason made a promise to Yazgur in the courtroom before he left. “You’ll never see a penny,” Mason vowed.
On March 1, the day before Lenz and Yazgur were shot, a sheriff’s office ordered Mason to make his first payment of the settlement.
Mason is being held without bail. Police were alerted to the history between the two men by Yazgur’s lawyer, and Mason was arrested Monday at Boston Medical Center as he worked with patients.
Yazgur remains in a coma at the same hospital. Police, however, did not release the location of the hospital at which Yazgur was being treated until after a suspect was apprehended, knowing of Mason’s military background and fearing for Yazgur’s safety.
Born in Worcester, Mason is a U.S.-born Israeli citizen who trained in a special commando unit of the Israeli military before leaving Israel and going to Dartmouth College to study history in 1988. His legal troubles began then; while at Dartmouth he was arrested following a dispute over weights at a gym, but was never convicted and instead ordered to undergo psychological testing.
He graduated from Dartmouth in 1993, the same year he was arrested for breaking into a girlfriend’s house and threatening to murder her. A year later, he enrolled in the Boston University School of Medicine.
Mason was scheduled to graduate in May. He was to begin work in a pediatrics rotation tomorrow at North Shore Children’s Hospital.
Yazgur, who lived in Brookline after moving from the Soviet Union, is currently employed as a computer engineer. He and Lenz, who was a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, were reportedly up talking and drinking cocktails into the early morning the night before they were shot.
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