CSI Episode # 906 “Say Uncle”

If after last week’s dis­ap­point­ing episode you hoped the CSIs would solve the S&M mur­ders, don’t hold your breath. You aren’t going find your answers in this episode either. Not even a men­tion of last week, and Grissom seems through pin­ing over Sara. If I didn’t know bet­ter I’d think the episodes were played out of order.

But don’t let your dis­ap­point­ment taint how well you liked this episode. In almost all ways this week was vastly supe­rior. Better foren­sics, bet­ter inves­ti­ga­tion. Even the soap opera-ish Grissom-Sara rela­tion­ship drama was absent, and that wasn’t a bad thing at all.

As the episode opens we wit­ness a Korean man and woman gunned down in the mid­dle of a crowded open mar­ket in Las Vegas’s Korea town. The Korean locals won’t help out with the inves­ti­ga­tion, either because they are fiercely loyal to their coun­try­men, or more likely because will­ing wit­nesses wrap up the episode too quick.

At the scene we find a children’s pair of sun­glasses near the bod­ies, cov­ered with high veloc­ity blood spat­ter. The male vic­tim is iden­ti­fied by the prison release forms he’s car­ry­ing as Sun Bang, who iron­i­cally was released from prison ear­lier that day with all his prop­erty, includ­ing a 9mm pis­tol. The female vic­tim has no ID, but she’s thought to be a pros­ti­tute. Autopsy reveals Sun Bang was shot with a revolver, and the female vic­tim was shot with a 9mm auto-loading pistol.

The CSIs inter­view wit­nesses, hop­ing to dis­cover the iden­tity of the child who dropped the sun­glasses at the scene. To help inter­view the Korean eye­wit­nesses (none of who admit to speak­ing English), Officer Kwan is brought in to trans­late. I only men­tion Officer Kwan because he is played James Kyson Lee, same actor who plays Ando in the NBC series Heroes. Interesting how on CBS he’s Korean, and on NBC he’s Japanese. Is that polit­i­cally cor­rect? But I digress.

The big break in the case, and prob­a­bly the best foren­sic scene in the episode, comes when Catherine vis­its a depart­ment store with state of the art secu­rity. The store has a fic­ti­tious name, but basi­cally it’s Target. Believe it or not, as seen here on TV, Target really has it’s own foren­sic lab capa­bil­i­ties. From high tech video, to latent prints and other foren­sic test­ing, cor­po­rate America is devel­op­ing in-house foren­sic labs to cut theft. In the case of Target, partly for shoplift­ing, but their pri­mary source of theft is actu­ally employee theft, or “shrink­age” as it’s some­times called. I worked with a foren­sic video spe­cial­ist who was pos­si­bly the best guy in the Phoenix met­ro­pol­i­tan area. He left to go work for “CSI: Target”.

“Target” sur­veil­lance video shows Sun Bang shop­ping with a boy who a CPS inves­ti­ga­tor iden­ti­fies as his nephew, Park Bang, the sun­glass kid from the scene. She also iden­ti­fies pho­tos of the female vic­tim as Park’s mother, Kora Sil. Both Park and Kora are HIV pos­i­tive, and Park is in a clin­i­cal trial with exper­i­men­tal HIV drugs.

Computer foren­sics iden­ti­fies the IP address of the com­puter used to update Kora’s social net­work­ing site used for her pros­ti­tu­tion busi­ness. The computer’s owner is Jin Pan, a friend of Park’s Korean gang­ster father who took Kora and Park into his home after Park’s father died. Jin Pan says he’s straight­ened up and through run­ning with a bad crowd.

The CSIs even­tu­ally locate Park Bang hid­ing in a Korean woman’s home near the crime scene. Park has missed his HIV drug treat­ment and is imme­di­ately carted off to the hos­pi­tal. The drug company’s doc­tor admin­is­ters Park’s exper­i­men­tal HIV drug cock­tail, but Park fights and has to be restrained while the the drugs are admin­is­tered through a gas­tric tube implanted in his stomach.

As we find out, the drug side effects are beyond nasty, and Grissom pre­vents the drug company’s doc­tor from admin­is­ter­ing more doses of the HIV drugs the next day. Backed by the CPS worker, Grissom threat­ens endan­ger­ment charges against the doc­tor if he forces more drugs into the boy. Now Grissom has scored points and earned Park’s trust.

Park explains what he wit­nessed the day of the shoot­ing. His uncle, Sun Bang, vis­ited Park after he got out of jail. Sun Bang was furi­ous when he saw Park’s implanted gas­tric tube, and forcibly took the boy from Kora. Park and Sun Bang ended up in the mar­ket, where Jin Pan and Kora found them. Kora was armed with a revolver, and Jin armed with a 9mm pis­tol. Kora shot Sun Bang, and Jin shot Kora. Forensic recon­struc­tion will prove this is not how the shoot­ing happened.

Interesting Forensic Aspects:

Trajectory deter­mi­na­tion was inter­est­ing in this case. The CSIs brought out the black foam dum­mies for Park to recon­struct where every­one was at the time of the shoot­ing. It’s clear Park is lying about the scene. Trajectory analy­sis was con­sis­tent with Kora shoot­ing Sun Bang. But the angles also prove that Park shot his mother Kora using Sun Bang’s pistol.

Kora forced the nasty exper­i­men­tal drugs on Park to earn money. When Kora shot his uncle, the only per­son who had tried to pro­tect him, Park grabbed his uncle’s pis­tol from his waist­band, and shot his mother.

Grissom’s response to the solved crime, and the last line of the show, was that he wished they hadn’t solved the case. I could’t agree more. Why can’t we get a redo, Grissom? How about this: don’t solve this case, and instead solve last week’s case.

The best part of the show for me was the CSIs pulling in extra bod­ies to search the crime scene for evi­dence in the form of a bag with mer­chan­dise Sun Bang bought at the “Target” store. Hodges is once again dragged out of the lab and into the field, the last place he wants be. After get­ting the march­ing orders, every­one goes off their own way to look for the miss­ing evi­dence. Hodges walks straight over to the clos­est trash can, opens it up, pulls out the miss­ing bag, and asks, “Can I go now?”