CSI Miami Episode #705 “Bombshell”

[ratings]Eureka! The open­ing Horatio line was funny! Referring to a mur­der that took place in a fash­ion bou­tique as, “Murder by design,” was pretty good.

Before I get into the foren­sic sci­ence in this episode… How respon­si­ble is it for CSI to demon­strate that cloth­ing secu­rity tags can be defeated by heat­ing a knife to cut through the plas­tic, or wrap­ping the sen­sors in alu­minum foil to pre­vent store alarms from going off? Regardless if either method actu­ally works, you know some shoplift­ing moron is going to test the the­ory. Wouldn’t be the first time a crim­i­nal mim­ic­ked one of the meth­ods demon­strated in CSI.

As a foren­sic sci­en­tist work­ing for police, I’ve been shown how to defeat bul­let proof vests, cir­cum­vent locked doors, and com­pletely change rifling char­ac­ter­is­tics on firearms to make it impos­si­ble to “match” a bul­let (or cas­ing) back to a gun. You’d never see me offer­ing how-to lessons to the pub­lic. Ok, I’m done with my rant… on to the show.

Yet again, Julia and Kyle are in trou­ble. But there’s a shock­ing rev­e­la­tion! Julia is bi-polar! I don’t have an issue with her hav­ing a men­tal ill­ness, it actu­ally explains her per­sis­tent erratic behav­ior. But when per­ti­nent back-story info is casu­ally thrown in all the time to progress a spe­cific plot point (ie Eric Delko is sud­denly half-Russian), it gets annoying.

The episode cen­ters along two plot lines. The first being a pair of girls involved in a designer cloth­ing shoplift­ing ring. The sec­ond is a homi­cide in Julia’s dri­ve­way while she’s con­ve­niently not tak­ing her psych meds, the vic­tim pos­si­bly hit and killed by her car, result­ing in a who-done-it. Julia or Kyle?

In the shoplift­ing story, the two girls are in a bou­tique try­ing on (and steal­ing) clothes. One of the girls tries on a dress that we later find out has a charge of C-4 sewn into it. When she zips up the dress, the dress blows up with her in it, and she dies. Her friend is charged with felony grand theft. She’s lucky she doesn’t live in Arizona. That felony theft charge would quickly get rolled up into a felony mur­der charge in Maricopa County. (If some­one dies while com­mit­ting a felony, all other par­ties com­mit­ting the felony are guilty of felony murder).

The foren­sic aspects:

1) The CSIs find out the iden­tity of the dress bomber based on him prick­ing his fin­ger while sewing the C-4 into the dress. A drop of his blood is cap­tured in one of the seams, still pre­served after the explosion.

Sounds good so far. But now I’m back to sound­ing like a bro­ken record. The DNA results were back instantly (while the sec­ond shoplifter is still being held), and of course the bomber was already in CODIS (Combined DNA Index System), mak­ing iden­ti­fi­ca­tion a sure thing. How lucky for the CSIs. I wish every case were as easy and quick in real life.

2) They place the bomber in the store plant­ing the explo­sive dress from a cell­phone snap­shot that hap­pens to catch the bomber’s left hand show­ing his watch.

Try this one at home folks. Stand back 6 feet from some­one wear­ing a watch, take a pic­ture with your cell­phone, and try to pos­i­tively iden­tify the make and model of watch. If you can, you have a bright future in foren­sics wait­ing for you!

3) Back at Julia’s house, the pow­ers that be at Miami-Dade PD actu­ally allow Horatio to process a car that his son (an ex-felon if you recall) pos­si­bly used to kill a neigh­bor he was seen fist-fighting with ear­lier that day. (This would never happen.)

Horatio finds noth­ing until Delko dis­cov­ers a crit­i­cal piece of key evi­dence: a piece of crab shell on the driver’s side floor board. Any defense attor­ney is going to scream the police planted evi­dence to cover for Horatio’s kid. And there would prob­a­bly be rea­son­able doubt in the jury’s mind once the defense presents all the other unortho­dox things Horatio has done in crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tions for Julia and Kyle. Like oh, say, tak­ing a bul­let and fak­ing his own death.

At least Mac (Gary Sinese from CSI NY) would have run the crab shell through the Crab DNA Database, dis­cov­er­ing it’s from an extremely rare species of crab that only one restau­rant in all of Miami serves, and only one cus­tomer bought that day.

Instead as it turns out, we have some schmuck admit­ting to try­ing to steal Julia’s car, and acci­den­tally hit­ting our vic in Julia’s dri­ve­way. Once again, our schmuck’s lucky he’s not in Arizona. That would be felony homicide.