The medical school community is mourning the death of alumnus Michael J. Davidson, M.D. ’96, following a shooting Tuesday at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Mass., where was a cardiovascular surgeon. He was 44.
The alleged shooter, a 55-year-old man from the Boston area, was subsequently found dead, apparently from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Police said the assailant, identified as Stephen Pasceri of Millbury, Mass., “had some issue” with prior medical treatment of his mother at the hospital, the Boston Globe reported.
“This terrible event is devastating to those who knew Dr. Davidson here as a student and classmate,” said Yale School of Medicine Dean Robert J. Alpern, M.D. “We send our deepest condolences to Dr. Davidson’s family and friends and his colleagues in Boston.”
Dr. Davidson was director of endovascular cardiac surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a member of the faculty at Harvard Medical School. He was a Princeton graduate who went on to earn his M.D. degree at Yale in 1996 before residency training at Duke University and at Brigham and Women’s. He completed fellowships in endovascular surgery and cardiac catheterization and in cardiac surgery, also at Brigham and Women's.
“Dr. Davidson was a wonderful and inspiring bright light and an outstanding cardiac surgeon who devoted his career to saving lives and improving the quality of life of every patient he cared for,” the hospital’s president, Elizabeth Nabel, M.D., said in a statement. “It is truly devastating that his own life was taken in this horrible manner.”
Nabel said that Dr. Davidson was part of the team that performed the hospital’s first tricuspid “valve-in-valve” procedure and was involved in establishing the hybrid OR at Brigham and Women’s, one of the most advanced operating rooms in the country.
Susan Ryu Gaynon, M.D. ’76, president of the Association of Yale Alumni in Medicine, said that the news has profoundly shocked members of the alumni body. “You cannot imagine something like this, it is such a terrible loss,” she said. “I speak for all of us collectively, as a family. We care about each other, every one of us, and have tremendous sympathy.”