Daniel Mason

BA, Dartmouth College

Meet Daniel Mason. He’s no dummy, but he did some really stupid things. First, the no-dummy part: he graduated from Dartmouth in 1993 with a history degree and was accepted the following year at the Boston University School of Medicine. From which he never graduated. And that brings us to the stupid part.

On second thought, a little backstory might be helpful. Mason was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. When he was seven, his divorced mother moved with him to Israel. He grew up there and served in what he described as a special commando unit of the Israeli military where, he claimed, he was trained to be an assassin. When his military service was over he moved back to the US to attend Dartmouth.

Mason had a temper on him. At Dartmouth he was once arrested after some kind of eruption at a gym, but other than some psychological testing, nothing came of it. Oh, and he was arrested again the year he graduated, for threatening to kill his girlfriend after kicking his way into her house. Again, no prison time.

Okay, enough backstory. Now the stupid part… but, come to think of it, the stupid part overlaps with those anger explosions. We next see him as a medical student. A medical student with a pathological case of road rage. A twenty-eight-year-old Russian immigrant named Eugene Yazgur had the bad fortune to park his van in such a way that it blocked the forward progress of Mason’s car. Yazgur said he’d move the van in a few minutes, but that wasn’t fast enough for Mason, who thought he’d speed things along by slashing Yazgur’s face, quite badly, with a blade.

Mason was found guilty of assault, and because he appeared to be a nice, normal, white med student, was given probation rather than jail time. But this is America, so Yazgur sued for damages. He won, and on March 1, 2001, Mason was ordered to pay him $118,000 over the next twenty years. “You’ll never see a penny,” Mason reportedly hissed at Yazgur in the courtroom, which you’d think would be cause for a bailiff or a prosecutor or the judge to step forward and—admittedly, this is speculative; we’re not lawyers—fucking tase his ass, or something.

But no. Here’s what did happen. At 1:30 the next morning Daniel Mason repeated the “he’ll never see a penny of it” trope to his roommate, J. D. Smith, adding, informatively, “I’ll kill him first.” Later, appropriately wearing a black hat, Mason drove over to where Yazgur lived with his Great Dane, Samson, and a roommate, twenty-five-year-old Michael Lenz. Somehow—we assume it was easy for a former commando—he slipped into their apartment. Of course he had a gun or two. First he shot Lenz several times, killing him. Then he found Yazgur’s bedroom and shot him in the face. Apparently Mason wasn’t such a great assassin, though. Yazgur, not dead, tried to flee. Mason kept shooting, hitting him in the chest and both legs before he felt his work was done. On the way out he shot and killed Yazgur’s dog. He then drove to Boston Medical Center to start his rotation at 7:00 a.m.

Yazgur, shot as many as eight times, was a mess after seventeen surgeries, but he survived. Despite his difficulty talking—a bullet had mangled his tongue and destroyed several teeth—he testified for two days at Mason’s trial.

Daniel Mason, Dartmouth ’93, was sentenced to life without parole for the first-degree murder of Michael Lenz, plus a second life sentence for home invasion, plus a concurrent nineteen-to-twenty-year sentence for the attempted murder of Eugene Yazgur.

Alas, prison’s gain was medicine’s loss: when he committed his crimes, Mason was two months away from receiving his medical degree from BU.