Nothing about former Sewickley YMCA youth director Troy Brownlow hinted at a dark past.
"He seemed like a good guy. He worked good with the kids," Sewickley obstetrician Dr. Frank DiCenzo said Tuesday, remembering a weeklong 1996 trip to the Grand Canyon with Brownlow and a group of teens. "You can't really tell what someone is like from a week."
Brownlow, 42, is in an Arizona jail awaiting extradition to Colorado on charges he killed a 15-year-old girl 25 years ago. An autopsy found that Nanine Grimes had been stabbed more than 80 times.
Authorities connected Brownlow to the slaying earlier this month through a national DNA database. Brownlow, who was arrested April 14, faces murder charges in Colorado.
Brownlow began working for the YMCA in Denver in 1982, shortly after graduating from high school. He landed a job as youth director at the Sewickley YMCA in the mid-1990s and remained there for about two years, according to DiCenzo.
By that time, Brownlow had been charged with larceny and second-degree burglary in two separate cases. Though the Sewickley Y now does background checks on prospective employees, Sewickley YMCA Executive Director Dave Stevenson could not say whether a check was done on Brownlow.
Stevenson declined to comment on Brownlow.
Brownlow's run-ins with the law, including larceny and aggravated assault charges, date to 1984, according to the Rocky Mountain News. His latest resulted in a theft conviction and a three-year prison sentence, and ultimately connected him to the Sept. 4, 1980, murder near his boyhood home in Adams County, Colo.
Blood drawn from Brownlow upon his release from prison in February 2004 was entered into a national DNA database and later linked to the Grimes killing by the Colorado Bureau of Investigations during a routine review of cold cases.
"The blood samples matched DNA found in a number of locations at the crime scene," said Adams County Assistant District Attorney Michael Goodbee.
Joseph Correa, an outgoing member of the Y's board of directors who has been involved with the facility since 1991, said he remembered Brownlow but didn't like him.
"I am not surprised," Correa said.
DiCenzo, 49, a Y member since 1986, said Brownlow moved back to Colorado about six months after the Grand Canyon trip.
Several years later, DiCenzo, at the request of another Y youth group leader, wrote a short letter to a judge on behalf of Brownlow, charged in 2000 with firing a gun at his girlfriend. DiCenzo had forgotten writing it.
"I only wrote what I knew. He was good with the kids during that week," DiCenzo said. "I didn't write a lot because I didn't know a lot."
DiCenzo said when he learned of Brownlow's murder arrest, "My jaw almost hit the ground. I was in total shock."
In addition to the Grand Canyon trip, DiCenzo said Brownlow played ball with children at the Y and took them to a wave pool.
"It's chilling to know I was camping out with a guy that murdered a 15-year-old girl," he said. "Anybody who has children will be horrified. To think that their child was with an alleged murderer, especially considering the circumstances, would be bone chilling. I didn't know. Nobody knew."
Staff writer David Conti contributed to this report.
