Before Nick Brooks received the maximum sentence of 25 years to life in prison for murdering his girlfriend, Sylvia Cachay, in a bathtub at Soho House in 2010, he faced her father, who called him “an animal” and “a sewer rat,” and her mother, who recalled applying makeup to her daughter’s face as she lay in her coffin. Brooks, the son of Grammy-winning composer Joseph Brooks, had asked for the minimum sentence of fifteen years, saying he could be reformed. But the judge obviously disagreed, saying he had “squandered his privileged background.”
