GRIEVING: Sharon Lombardo, a friend of tragic Sylvie Cachay, leaves Manhattan court yesterday after testifying. (Gregory P. Mango)
Sylvie Cachay
Nicholas Brooks (Steven Hirsch)
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He had threatened to kill her before.
Layabout stoner Nicholas Brooks got so enraged during arguments with swimsuit-designer girlfriend Sylvie Cachay that he would erupt into death threats, one of Cachay’s girlfriends testified yesterday.
“She told me that he would get so angry that he would threaten to kill her,” testified Sharon Lombardo, describing the volatile romance that prosecutors say ended with Brooks’ hands around the beauty’s neck in an overflowing Soho House hotel-room bathtub.
“She complained about him always being at her house and never leaving. She complained about him getting stoned all the time. She complained about having to pay for everything. She complained about how angry he got when he was drinking,” the Kate Spade fashion exec told jurors.
Cachay had another complaint, Lombardo said: Brooks had demanded “porn” sex.
“She told me he wanted to have sex all the time, like a f–king rabbit — that’s her words,” Lombardo told jurors.
“What’s your understanding of ‘porn’ sex?” asked prosecutor Jordan Arnold.
“That he wanted to have sex all the time, like all the time to the point where it was extremely exhausting for her,” Lombardo answered.
Earlier yesterday, EMT Samantha Wilding described seeing Cachay’s soaking wet, half-dressed body on the hotel-room floor, where it had been pulled from the tub by hotel staffers that early morning in December 2010. She described attaching electrodes to Cachay’s chest.
But throughout nearly a half-hour of heart-defibrillator efforts, “Her heart rhythm never changed,” the EMT said. “It was flat-lined. That means the heart isn’t beating. It means that the person is dead.
“While this person was alive, there was a significant amount of air in the lungs that the patient was not able to expel,” she told jurors, citing a CO2 test.
Cachay’s artist mother, Sylvia, and surgeon father, Antonio, held hands in the audience, and bowed their heads to avoid crime-scene photos shown on a TV screen.
“Oh, God,” a whisper could be heard, as close-ups were shown of Cachay’s face as she lay on the room’s carpet. The photo showed a tube still taped to Cachay’s bluish lips and the hint of redness at her neck, where Brooks’ hands had allegedly grasped.
On cross-examination, defense lawyer Jeffrey Hoffman tried to highlight the aggressiveness of the failed resuscitation in an apparent attempt to blame some of Cachay’s incriminating neck and mouth injuries on paramedics, and even on the hotel staffers who had lifted her out of the tub.