After deliberating for almost two full days, a Suffolk Superior Court jury today convicted a Mattapan man of first-degree murder under the theory of extreme atrocity and cruelty for fatally beating and subsequently dismembering his 70-year-old father three years ago, Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley announced.

Shortly after the jury returned its verdict, Superior Court Judge John Cratsley sentenced BRIAN LEE (D.O.B. 9/14/63) to the mandatory sentence for murder one, life in prison without the possibility of parole.

“Three years later, we know what happened to Edward Lee, Jr.,” Conley said, “but we will never understand why. It was and remains inexplicable. Our hearts go out to the rest of the Lee family, who must struggle every day with the tragedy that befell their family.”

Assistant District Attorney Holly Broadbent, chief of Conley’s Domestic Violence Unit, proved during eight days of testimony from more than a dozen witnesses that, sometime between Oct. 25 and Oct. 27, 2006, Brian Lee beat Edward Lee, Jr., about the head and torso with a blunt object, killing him, in the victim’s bedroom. The younger Lee then dismembered his father’s body with a power saw inside the victim’s Hollingsworth Street bedroom.

On Oct. 25, 2006, Edward Lee obtained a restraining order against his son at Dorchester District Court.

On Oct. 27, Brian Lee carried a bloody mattress that had been torn in half out of his father’s home, and threw it into the back of a garbage truck on trash day.

On Oct. 28, he deposited several white trash bags into bins behind the residence of a Homestead Street woman for whom he had previously done manual labor; when she and her daughter pulled the bags from the bins and looked inside, they discovered the dismembered limbs and decapitated head of Edward Lee.

Brian Lee represented himself with the assistance of defense attorney Denise Regan before Judge John C. Cratsley in courtroom 815. The victim-witness advocate assigned to the case was Katherine Moran.