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Update: Yesterday afternoon, we noted that local media had not yet reported that Nicholas Brooks, 24, the suspect in the sensational slaying of fashion designer Sylvie Cachay in New York City, had previously attended CU.
Now, however, the Boulder Daily Camera has picked up the story — and according to the paper’s reportage, there’s no record of Brooks causing trouble at the university.
CU spokesman Bronson Hilliard told the Camera that Brooks enrolled during the spring 2008 semester and lived in a Williams Village dorm. Four semesters later, the Leeds School of Business management major left CU voluntarily, and there’s no record of the campus police giving him any black marks.
He’s got one now, as is clear from our previous coverage, on view below.
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Original item, 12:59 p.m. December 13: The shocking murder of fashion designer Sylvie Cachay, whose body was found in the bathtub of a NYC hotel, has a significant Colorado connection.
Nicholas Brooks, 24, who’s been charged with the crime, is a former CU student whose Facebook photos, grabbed by DNAInfo.com, depict him as a party-loving fun-seeker who has just one degree of separation from Christian-music vocalist Debby Boone.
Brooks’s father, Joseph Brooks, wrote Boone’s biggest hit, “You Light Up My Life,” which won an Academy Award as Best Song in 1978. Boone said she sang this particular love song to God.
The elder Brooks made far less heavenly news last year. As reported by the New York Times, he was arrested in June 2009 “on charges of raping or sexually assaulting 11 women lured to his East Side apartment from 2005 to 2008.”
With this kind of twisted pedigree, it’s no wonder the media is jumping all over the Cachay case, with mainstream news organizations like CBS and celebutainment press outlets such as American Superstar weighing in with theories about possible motives — the most popular being that Brooks was unhappy about his breakup with Cachay, who launched her own swimwear line after working for Tommy Hilfiger and Victoria’s Secret. They’d reportedly been dating for around six months.
At this point, Brooks’s CU past doesn’t appear to have registered with area outlets such as the Denver Post and 9News, but that won’t last long — not on a story apparently destined to become tabloid-television fare for months to come.
More from our Colorado Crimes archive: “JonBenét Ramsey case: New interviews sought but cops not saying with whom (like Burke?).”
