Cary strangler guilty of 1st-degree murder in choking deaths of mother, ex-girlfriend
Superior Court Judge Graham Shirley gave these parting instructions Thursday to convicted strangler Brandon Lee: Lay his head on the pillow at Central Prison, and as he hears the “iron lock” of the cell door, think of the two minutes he spent choking his victims.
Then think of them every night for the next 40.1 years — Lee’s life expectancy.
Shirley sentenced Lee, 38, to two consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole after jurors found him guilty of first-degree murder for killing his mother and ex-girlfriend. He did so after the Cary man took the rare step of testifying in his own defense, pantomiming both murders from the witness stand then, for a day, refusing to answer a prosecutor’s questions.
“Who was protecting the rights of Christa and Krystal when you were strangling them?” Shirley asked Lee. “Strangulation is the most personal form of murder that exists. ... It was your selfish behavior that caused this.”
Minutes after the jury’s unanimous verdict, the father of Krystal Hylton, Lee’s former girlfriend, rose and thanked the jury in a soft voice.
“This is a challenging time for me,” said Kirk Hylton, a soldier for 25 years. “I have been in almost every war we’ve fought since 1983. But this.”
His granddaughter, now 10, will not sleep alone four years after her mother’s murder, he said.
“On the positive side,” he said. “She’s a straight-A student. She’s a member of Fort Bragg swim team. I will dedicate my life for her, to make sure she feels safe.”
As he was being sentenced, Lee stood and apologized to both families, saying he accepted the verdict as Jesus’ will and pledging to become a better man.
“Life is not perfect,” he said. “One bad decision can lead to another bad decision, and that’s kind of what my story is.”
He said he will offer his testimony about drug and alcohol abuse to rehabilitation centers, hoping that his victims’ deaths “will not be in vain.”
Lesser charge sought
The case brought out macabre details that Lee recalled from the witness stand for two days over the course of the trial, occasionally sobbing. After choking his mother, he said, he placed her body in the bathtub, filled it with ice twice and sprayed Febreze to fight the smell as she lay there for a week.
Lee’s attorney, Jonathan Broun, had argued for a lesser charge, saying Lee did not act in a “cool state of mind” and the homicides were not deliberate, He had asked for second-degree murder for the death of Hylton and voluntary manslaughter for the death of his client’s mother, Christa Lee — sentences that would mean less prison time.
“Dragging your mother into a bathtub and trying to fill it with ice is not a sign of somebody who is rational,” Broun said, listing the defendant’s alcoholism, depression, lost jobs and broken relationships as factors. “Krystal Hylton was right to reject him. ... But at that moment, he had nobody else in the world, and at that moment he simply could not take it anymore.”
But Assistant District Attorney Patrick Latour argued for first-degree murder for both deaths, stressing that plans for a murder can be made in an instant, and even while angry, without requiring a detailed outline.
As he began his closing statement to the jury, Latour stood quietly for two minutes, staring at jurors and bowing his head until an alarm rang on his podium.
“Two minutes,” he said. “That was two minutes. What’s the importance of two minutes? Well, for Christa Lee and Krystal Hylton, at least two minutes is what it took to take their lives. ... Ask yourself how awkward was that, how long was that, and why is that important? Because that’s what they want you to think was an instant. That’s what they want you to think was ‘snapping.’”
He ticked off a long list of choices Lee made: he covered his mother with ice to buy time, he spoke of unfinished business after her death, he went to the movies and got tattoos between killing them, he got drunk and confronted a perceived rival by sneaking in the backdoor of his workplace, he went to Hylton’s house with a hammer and a knife, he broke in through the window.
“There’s two minutes he’s got to think about it,” Latour said. “In those two minutes before he kills her, at any time he can let go and they’re still here.”
Body in the tub
Lee, 34 at the time of his arrest, lived with his mother on Havers Drive. When he called 911 in December 2015, he told dispatchers she had attacked him with a knife, trying to kill them both. Latour stressed Thursday that his mother was not threatening him with the knife at the time she was strangled.
Police broke in the bathroom door of the apartment they shared and found her body in the tub, where it had lain fully clothed and partially covered in ice for roughly a week, a search warrant said at the time.
Officers later arrested Lee at Hylton’s apartment, where he had called 911. They found the girlfriend’s body on the floor there and Lee’s mother’s Volkswagen parked outside.
The 911 caller, identified as Lee, told dispatchers Hylton had been “seeing someone else and lying to me, and I ended up choking her, too.”
From the witness stand Tuesday, Lee pantomimed choking his mother and ex-girlfriend to death, telling jurors that he screamed “Die! Die!” as his mother expired on the floor. On Wednesday, he testified he choked his suicidal mother four years ago “because this is what she always wanted.”
This story was originally published October 3, 2019 at 12:52 PM.