Suffolk trial witness recounts grisly discovery

According to Suffolk Assistant District Attorney Holly Broadbent, what Collins and her daughter found that day was the head of Edward Lee, Brian Lee's 70-year-old father, whom the son is accused of beating to death two days earlier.

Broadbent told the jurors in her opening statement that the 46-year-old Brian Lee killed his father on Oct. 26 in his father's Homestead Street home and then used a power saw to dismember him.

"For reasons we will never understand ... he used that saw to cut through the flesh and bone of the man who helped bring him into the world,'' Broadbent said.

Brian Lee, who is representing himself, declined to make an opening statement, choosing instead to wait until prosecutors complete presenting its evidence.

Lee wore brown-rimmed glasses, a scraggly chin beard, dreadlocks, and a business suit in the courtroom. He has pleaded not guilty.

In her opening, Broadbent said the relationship between father and son was occasionally severely strained -- as it was shortly before Edward Lee was murdered.

On Oct. 25, Edward Lee got a restraining order from Dorchester Municipal Court, banning his son from returning to Homestead Street, where the elder Lee had lived for more than three decades, she said.

"He was a quiet man who kept to himself,'' Broadbent said of the elder Lee. "He was polite. He was a loner.''

Collins, the prosecution's first witness, said she came to know Brian Lee because he and her daughter, Karen, were friends.

She said that she once hired Brian Lee to fix a wall in her home and was overjoyed at the quality of his work. She said she paid him by renting him a car for the week, which he then used to operate as a cab driver in Boston.

On the day she found the elder Lee's head, Collins said Brian Lee had asked if he could toss some bags into a neighbor's rented garbage bin. "He just said he had something to throw out,'' Collins testified, adding she persuaded Lee not to use the neighbor's bin.

Collins said she is a gardener who has precise ideas on how she can make her flowers grow. One of those ideas is to have plenty of "compost water'' on hand -- and she kept four large barrels in her backyard with the water in 2006.

While standing in he kitchen she said she saw Brian Lee walk past her window carrying several plastic bags. Moments later, he walked past her again, looked at her -- but had nothing in his arms.

After she and her daughter found the head, she prayed to Catholic saints, hobbled inside their home and called 911. "There's a head, but it's dead,'' she told police. "In my yard.''

After telling her story today, Collins made the sign of the cross on the witness stand, where she will return on Monday when the trial resumes and Lee gets his chance to cross-examine her.