Life of torment came to brutal end on Cape

By John McElhenny, Globe Correspondent, 9/23/2003

Before the pizza shop on Cape Cod there were years spent in a Bosnian city infamous for its violent ethnic cleansing and concentration camps. Then last year, amid the rebuilding that followed the carnage and confusion, Milenko Majstorovic, 26, left for New York.

America offered a new life for the young Bosnian, a place where a boyhood friend helped him land a job at a Harwich pizza shop and shared a room with him at the Plantation Motor Inn in West Dennis. But somewhere along the way, the new beginning began to unravel and Majstorovic bounced from a homeless shelter to jail to a mental health clinic.

Yesterday, authorities revealed a tragic end to Majstorovic's journey when they identified him as the man who was tied to a tree in a wooded conservation area of Barnstable in May and burned alive. Nearby were a gas container, a half-eaten apple, and a pile of folded men's clothing.

Majstorovic's body, found May 17, was burned so badly that it took nearly four months to identify and even then it was with the aid of specialists, including an anthropologist from the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History and a dentist from the state Medical Examiner's Office.

Michael O'Keefe, the Cape and Islands district attorney reviewing the case, said investigators don't know who killed Majstorovic or why, just that it's not likely that his death was a random act.

"We're investigating all avenues," O'Keefe said. "We're appealing to the public for help."

A picture began to emerge yesterday of the odyssey that began in Majstorovic's hometown of Prijedor, Bosnia -- notorious for ethnic cleansing during the war from 1992 to 1995 -- and ended in the Cape Cod forest.

One desperate point along the way apparently came last October, when Majstorovic, with little money and no place to sleep, asked police at Logan Airport to arrest him. When they declined, he set a fire in a trash can so they couldn't refuse him a night in jail, according to prosecutors.

Majstorovic arrived in New York City in June 2002. He then traveled to Wisconsin for a job arranged by an employment company, authorities said. A month later, he was on the East Coast, where a boyhood friend from Bosnia had been working at George's Pizza Shop in Harwich.

The friend, Dragoja Piljic, helped Majstorovic get a job there making sandwiches, and the two got a place together. They joined the young Bosnians and other immigrants holding summer jobs on the Cape, attending parties, improving their English, and meeting women.

The job at George's, however, lasted only a few weeks. Majstorovic didn't care for the bustle of restaurant life, said a woman who worked at the pizza shop who asked not to be identified. So he found a job painting houses.

It is not clear what troubled Majstorovic, said the employee, but the young Bosnian did not seem to enjoy life here. Majstorovic almost never smiled, the woman said, and he lamented having no family in Bosnia to return to. But he did not elaborate, she said.

"He was very unhappy, and he hardly talked much. He had lived through the war," said the woman. "He told friends it wasn't worth going back to."

The details of Majstorovic's life in Prijedor, a city of more than 120,000 people, are not clear.

Prior to the fighting, northern Bosnia was ethnically mixed, though mostly Muslim. But during the war, thousands of people were killed.

Prijedor is home to many of those indicted by the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague for crimes against humanity and genocide committed in the war, according to published reports.

Many Serb youths, according to reports, were pressured into taking part in the atrocities against Muslims.

In America, Majstorovic's unhappiness seemed to spill over in October 2002 when he borrowed a friend's car one day and drove to Logan Airport and tried to catch a plane home. But Majstorovic never boarded a flight; he was denied a seat on the plane either because the flight was full or he had come on the wrong day, the woman said.

Despondent and lacking the money to rent a hotel room, Majstorovic tried to get arrested so he would have a place to sleep, the woman said.

David Procopio, spokesman for the Suffolk district attorney's office, confirmed that on Oct. 12 Majstorovic told a state trooper that he needed a place to stay and then lit a piece of paper on fire outside Terminal B, leading to his arrest for disorderly conduct. Once in jail, Majstorovic acted even more strangely, drinking from the toilet and eating the wrapper from his tuna salad sandwich, said the woman, who said she served as a go-between with Majstorovic and authorities. He was then taken to a Boston-area mental health clinic, where he stayed about a month.

After Majstorovic was released, his downward spiral continued. Piljic had moved out of the Plantation Inn, and Majstorovic, now jobless and without lodging, sought refuge at a Hyannis homeless shelter.

The months passed, and in January, he was admitted to Cape Cod Hospital for an undisclosed malady.

The woman, who spoke with hospital officials about the stay, said Majstorovic went in for a sore neck. But she surmised that Majstorovic had nowhere else to go. X-rays taken during that hospital stay would later identify Majstorovic's remains.

In the months after his release from Cape Cod Hospital, Majstorovic lost touch with friends from George's Pizza and even Piljic.

Some on Cape Cod learned of his fate yesterday, when word spread around George's Pizza and other places where the unsmiling, quiet Bosnian was once known.

The woman said Majstorovic never really found a place in America, and yet seemed to have nothing and no one to return to in Bosnia. "He was," she said, "a lost soul."

Michael Rosenwald of the Globe Staff and Globe Correspondent Brian Whitmore contributed to this report. Rosenwald reported from Boston; Whitmore reported from Prague.