CSI Episode #901 “For Warrick”

[rat­ings]
The long awaited sea­son pre­mier is finally over. The expected death of CSI Warrick Brown came and went in one episode. I was hop­ing Undersheriff McKeen would hang around awhile as a vil­lain derail­ing the team’s efforts on future Gedda related inves­ti­ga­tions. Instead, every­thing was pack­aged up neatly with a bow, and Warrick Brown’s funeral closed out the episode.

Unexpected for me was the return of Sara Sidle. I fig­ured she was mak­ing a guest appear­ance for the funeral and would leave again. But pre­views sug­gest Sara will be around for at least the next episode. My wife thinks she will be the rea­son for Grissom leav­ing the team later this sea­son when he and Sara ride off into the sunset.

“For Warrick” was a good episode science-wise. No major crazi­ness, but then CSI Las Vegas has always been more sci­en­tif­i­cally grounded than the other two CSI series, with Miami rely­ing on gad­getry, and New York based in Big-Brother knowl­edge of the City.

The foren­sic points of interest:

1) Warrick’s team inves­ti­gat­ing his death. Ethically, I seri­ously doubt Warrick’s team would be inves­ti­gat­ing his mur­der. At the very least, another shift would pre­form the inves­ti­ga­tion (as we saw Dr. Robbins save the autopsy for the day crew). More likely a dif­fer­ent agency would be tasked with the investigation.

Even if you believe they could have inves­ti­gated Warrick’s mur­der, the defense would have a fan­tas­tic time attack­ing any phys­i­cal evi­dence in the case as being biased. Here’s my take on the weak, poten­tially biased investigation:

What proof does the team have tying McKeen to the mur­der of CSI Brown, really? Because he was first on scene?

The hotel room? McKeen could have been coerced into being there by threats made against his fam­ily by Pritchard.

The audio based shoot­ing recon­struc­tion? Grissom him­self con­firmed gun shots fired couldn’t be heard over the music blar­ing out of the bar at the time of the mur­der, prov­ing McKeen couldn’t have heard the shots that killed Warrick. Based upon this, they con­cluded McKeen was lying about being the first respon­der to the scene after hear­ing gun shots. As we already know, Grissom has hear­ing prob­lems. Isn’t it pos­si­ble Grissom just can’t hear over loud back­ground noise? Besides that, who’s to say McKeen doesn’t have bet­ter than aver­age hearing?

The car trip? Isn’t that because McKeen was being held at gun point by Pritchard? McKeen then hero­ically ran the car off the road to stop Pritchard from escap­ing to Mexico?

The print on the .25 auto car­tridge? Maybe those were McKeen’s car­tridges, but Pritchard used gloves to load the mag­a­zine after he stole the car­tridges from McKeen. Or per­haps Pritchard forced McKeen to load the magazine.

Suffice to say, I think the team had a pretty weak case.

2) The .25 cal­iber jack­eted hollow-point bul­let recov­ered at the scene. Let’s assume the pro­jec­tile would have expanded all the way as shown. I ques­tion if it would have had enough energy to exit. More likely it would have remained in Warrick’s neck.

But this is a minor point in an episode that was largely spot-on with the sci­ence. Finding the pro­jec­tile at the scene didn’t even mat­ter. Finding the .25 auto Berretta pis­tol with a ground-off ser­ial num­ber was enough to assume it was the mur­der weapon, only to be ver­i­fied later when the pro­jec­tile was recov­ered at autopsy.

This was the final episode fea­tur­ing the entire orig­i­nal cast together. Maybe a lit­tle sad, but I’m look­ing for­ward to see­ing the show give more air­time to the lab bunch now that Warrick is out. They def­i­nitely deserve it.