Reggie Hayes, right, also known as Reginald Mason, and his federal public defender, Danice Johnson, at the West Las Vegas Library on Thursday, January 21, 1999. Hayes held a community meeting to gain support for his pardon bid.
Thursday, Feb. 11, 2021 | 6:35 p.m.
Reginald Mason was an eighth-grader when he took a ride with a group of older teens in the middle of a night-long shooting spree, which ended with the kidnapping at gunpoint and slaying of a Nellis Air Force Base airman.
Four others survived gunshot wounds from that night in 1985.
While the three perpetrators ran away after a police chase, Mason stayed behind and told the cops what happened, leading officers to the body of John H. Brown, 21, and his killers.
Despite his cooperation, he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He was only 14. Sentenced for crimes he didn’t commit, he didn’t qualify for parole and, adding insult to injury, given 80 additional years, his life washed away.
The case against him started to fall apart less than a year later when the Nevada Supreme Court opened an emergency inquiry into the case that found willful misconduct a year before his trial, according to the Nevada Attorney General’s Office.
Still, Mason, who also uses the last name Hayes, had to wait till 1988 for some sort of reprieve: plead to first-degree kidnapping. He ended up serving 13 years in prison by the time he was pardoned.
On Tuesday Attorney General Aaron Ford announced that Nevada this week granted Mason a “certificate of innocence” and he was to be paid $975,000 for the wrongful conviction.
“I am elated that after many years, Mr. Mason has been declared an innocent man after he was arrested and convicted as a teenager," said Ford in a news release. "Time was stolen from him at a young age and no one can replace that. The pursuit of justice is paramount to the mission of my office, and I could not be prouder of the attorneys in my office who worked on this case to obtain justice for Mr. Mason.”
The payment of nearly $1 million was made possible through Nevada Assembly Bill 267, passed in the 2019 legislative session, which states that convicted persons who can prove their innocence are entitled to monetary compensation.
After his release from prison, Mason, then a 28-year-old man, appeared in front of a pardoning board in 1999. His eyes welled up, according to an archived Sun story.
"I finally get the opportunity to be a regular citizen," Mason said after the state Pardons Board unanimously agreed to erase his criminal record, according to the story.
He’d spoken about struggling to find steady work due to the stain of being an ex-felon. Newspaper clippings proving his innocence didn’t sway potential employers’ opinions about him.
"In the last three months, the door has been slammed in my face," he told the pardons board.
Then-Gov. Kenny Guinn, who also was the chairman of the pardons board, said about Mason at the time: “he didn’t run ... he pointed out everything. No one ever says he was lying. He seemed to be an awfully good citizen when he started.”
The night of terror began with gunshot blasts into a pickup truck near D Street and Jackson Avenue, police said. Two men were wounded.
At midnight, a 13-year-old boy was shot in the chest near Rainbow Boulevard and Twain Avenue, police said.
A couple of hours later, the suspects returned near the scene of the first shooting and shot a teenager in the stomach, police said.
An hour later, a teenage girl was shot in the neck near Owens Avenue Rancho Drive, police said.
Mason and his mother had gone to one of the suspect’s houses to talk to his parents because the woman didn’t approve of the friendship.
When the older teen went to get cigarettes for his father, Mason went with him. When they returned, Mason’s mother was gone.
So then he got into the car with the three suspects. From there, he told the court, the trio kidnapped Brown, who was on a newspaper delivery route, at gunpoint and put him in the car.
The driver refused to take Mason home, he told police.
They drove him to an alley and Mason stayed in the car while the trio stomped and robbed brown of $9.
The trio returned to the car, but one of the teens said he wanted to shoot him, so he stepped back out.
"No, don't shoot him, just drive off," Mason said he told him in court. He testified that he didn't hear the blast but saw him standing over the body with the rifle "pointed towards the face part."
Eddie Ray Hampton and Donald Ray Lee were convicted alongside Mason, as was Philip Minor, Hayes’ friend.
Seeking reprieve for Mason in the year before his pardon, former Metro Police Undersheriff Richard Winget wrote about him in a letter: "His story is a travesty that I would like to do everything possible to repair," Winget wrote. "It was a tragedy that he was even convicted, let alone in prison for all these years. This is our opportunity to right the wrong and give this man his life back."
