- CSI needs the help of an 8-year-old, HIV-positive boy to figure out who shot and killed his uncle and his mother during a street party in Koreatown.
- During a party in a square in Koreatown, there are five gunshots and, in the end, a man and a woman are found dead on the ground. LAVP and CSI investigate the crime, but there is no witness. Soon the man is identified as Sung Bang, who has just been released from prison, and Grissom finds a boy's sun glass on the floor. Dr. Robbins finds that the shots are from two different weapons, and Catherine and Riley find that Sung was arrested for two DUIs only. When Brass retrieves a footage from a department store, they learns that the boy is Sung's nephew Park Bang, and the woman is the boy's mother, Kora Sil, and soon they find that Kora and Park are HIV positive. When Nick and Riley find the boy in a neighbor's house, the CSIs begin the process to discover what happened in the square.—Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
- "CSI" - "Say Uncle" - Nov. 13, 2008
We open on a festive day scene as a young Asian woman rides her bike through a block party smiling and waving. There are barbecues and Mah-Jongg players and... oops, a shooting. People run and hit the deck. One young boy in sunglasses stands stock still, his face covered in blood.
Later detectives are interviewing bystanders but there are language barriers. There are two victims. Riley and Grissom take pictures. Male victim is Sung Bang. In his wallet is a prison release form. He was in for multiple DUIs. The female victim has no ID. Riley is figuring the killer must be Korean and it smells like a gang hit to her. Grissom picks up some kids sunglasses with blood spatter and prints. They figure he saw everything. Grissom says they need to find the kid before something happens to him.
A news report reports the shooting in Koreatown and how many Koreans distrust and/or fear the police.
A large group of Korean people are at the station, presumably for interviews.
Greg scans a man's clothes with a bluelight and finds blood spatter on his shirt. Brass interviews the guy who is not super cooperative but likes Brass' style. He says he'll give DNA but he won't snitch. Brass says they know it's gang-related. The guy figures they don't need him then.
Robbins is cataloguing the gun shot wounds. He and Grissom are trying to figure out if it's one perp, two guns, or two perps. The female vic has needle marks and odd eyelid scars they think might be plastic surgery, but that seems inconsistent with the likelihood that she's a street hooker.
Riley and Catherine are going over the Sung Bang's info. Aside from the DUIs his record is clean and he has no known gang affiliation and he'd gone to a department store earlier in the day, right after he got out of prison.
Catherine and Grissom compare notes. The female vic had gotten a form of eyelid surgery popular with Koreans that westernizes their appearance.
We flash to a scene of the plastic surgeon being forced to do the procedure at gunpoint. He's explaining to Brass that that is why he doesn't know her name. Apparently Jackie Chan had the surgery and that made it popular. To add insult to injury they also forced him into an arrangement whereby he gave them 15% of his profits. He has no names for Brass.He thinks they belonged to a gang called KD, a new outfit. Extortion is their trade and they take from their own because they know their own won't snitch on them. The doctor is no longer paying the extortion thanks to HMO-instituted surveillance cameras.
On cue a cop comes in and says they got a surveillance hit, even though the CSIs said there were no cameras at the scene. It's from the department store earlier in the day. Catherine and Brass go to check it out.
They're led into a "forensic services" lab at the department store. Very hi-tech. The store cop is all braggy about his catch rate. They find video of Sung Bang and a young boy shopping. They grab the toy the boy was holding, which the dept. store cops have already fingerprinted. It's the same print as on the child's sunglasses.
Brass watches video of the man and child leaving the store. The child, Park, was Sung's nephew. A female CPS investigator IDs him. She also IDs the female vic, Cora Sill, his mom. His dad is also dead, of AIDS, but he was also a big-time gangster. Sung took over caring for Park when his dad died. The mother and Park are also HIV positive. He's on a strict drug regimen, she says, so they need to find him. Brass says HIV may be the least of his problems now if the gang knows he saw everything and killed all of his relatives.
Catherine discovers that Cora did time for prostitution with HIV.
Sanders and another lab dude look over her Facebook type page which reveals she was born in Seoul, likes rap music and doesn't drink or smoke. They do some computer searching and find the last IP address which was in Koreatown.
Brass visits a man's house to investigate and- Ando from "Heroes" is one of his uniforms! The man allowed the family to use his computer since he knew Park's father, they came over from Korea together but went in different directions. (He sends a woman and child out of the room). He says he's done nothing wrong. Brass tells him about the shootings and the missing child. He says he was on Phoenix on business. He has no idea where Park might be. Brass gives him his card. He and Ando leave.
Stokes, Riley, and Greg do the circling the victims' routes thing on a big satellite map. The receipt from the department store shows that Sung bought Park a bunch of junk food, t-shirt, and sunglasses.
They, and a bunch of other cops, go to search the trash near the scene for candy wrappers and other stuff from the store. They instruct everyone to look everywhere. It appears that Hodges is squeamish about dumpster diving. But it turns out that he's just found the discarded department store bag in the first can he looked in.
They enter a nearby house to look for the boy and encounter an older Korean woman who yells at them in Korean. She pulls out a gun and trains it on Riley. Stokes tells her to put it down and tries to reason with her and says he's looking for a little boy. Riley thinks she doesn't understand English. The woman starts getting agitated. And then Park opens a door behind her and calms her down in Korean.
A doctor checks out Park as Riley looks on. Grissom arrives and she reports that Park is very weak and he won't speak to her. He asks where Park's CPS investigator is. She's en route. He's mad Riley interviewed a minor without an advocate present and tells her to not do it again. She said she was just trying to the help. He sends her back to the lab.
Grissom watches as the doctor takes Park's shirt off. He's covered in weird bumps- probably a side effect of his HIV meds- and has a gastric tube. Grissom asks questions about his condition.
We see a scene from the shooting earlier, it's the old woman watering her lawn. Park is leaning up against her fence. Through a translator- Ando- she tells Stokes that she took him in, fed him, let him play with some toys, and then take a nap. She says she was just trying to help. Stokes wonders why she pulled a gun on the police. She says where she comes from people take care of their neighbors. Stokes says she should've turned him over right away. She asks why, so you could cut another hole in his stomach?
In his hospital bed Brass is showing Park mug shots. He's not really looking. His CPS investigator is trying to help. Brass goes to leave and tells Grissom that he's going to put some cops on the door. Grissom introduces himself to Park and tells him he needs to collect "biologicals"- he needs stuff from under his nails. He's very gentle and sweet. The boy allows it.
An older white man enters purposefully, it's Park's doctor, Dr. Easling, who has come to give him his medication. Park doesn't want it , doesn't seem to like the doctor, and squirms and cries. Grissom notes this. This is why they gave him the tube, says the doctor. He seems mean and suspect.
Stokes and Grissom look over Park's clothes from the dumpster. A tech brings in a long list of the meds that he's on. It seems like he's dangerously over-medicated and is on some drugs that are experimental. They wonder how a kid with a junkie mom and gangster dad could be in a clinical trial.
Wendy does the fingernail scrapings tests in the lab with microscopes, potions etc. She discovers the skin of the guy who's house they went to who let the family use the computer. Jin Ming, the one who knew Park's family but went in a different direction. (He does have a record but it's old). It's skin from the gluteus maximus so Greg thinks he's also been molested. But Wendy isn't sure. The old photos show that the guy's neck is covered by tattooes but new photos show a clean neck. She thinks maybe he had surgery to cover over the tattoos with butt tissue, on the premise that a member of a secret gang who was trying to look upstanding would not want ID-ing marks.
Greg and some cops busts into his house. Which is now empty except for the basement which has a little room with a couple of beds and a TV. They surmise that Park and Cora lived in the basement, but they're not sure why exactly. In the corner Greg finds a card for a trial lawyer named Klondike and a lot of artwork. The other cop finds a photo of Ming, Park, and Cora. When he goes to pick it up he realizes it's connected to a string which is connected to a small explosive device. Which goes off.
Back at the lab Greg reports to Grissom that Det. Cavalier is going to be fine. Greg spoke to the "ambulance chaser" whose card they found. Turns out Cora was suing Park's doctor for money. The doctor apparently paid Cora $25 a week to put Park in the clinical trial. She wanted $50.
Grissom is researching HIV therapies in children on his computer. His look is impassive.
He goes to visit Park in the hospital. He confronts Dr. Easling who claims the drugs are saving his life. Grissom counters they are only truly bolstering the doctor's work. Easling claims Grissom is only seeing the side effects and it's a legitimate clinical trial. Grissom points out it's a trial underwritten by the pharmaceutical companies and wonders if Easling is getting kick backs. (The CPS investigator is listening to all of this.) The doctor says it's all perfectly legal. Grissom threatens that if Easling touches Park he'll slap him with child endangerment. CPS lady agrees. The doctor departs.
Grissom goes back and questions Park gently. He shows him a photo of Jin Ming, Park IDs it. He admits they lived in his house and that's where his Uncle Sung found him. We see Sung happily greet Park in the basement but be distraught about the tube and fight with Cora. Jin came down and Sung whacked him on the head. Sung saved him. (He grabbed Jin's neck when he fell on him). At the park later Jin found and shot Sung and Cora in front of Park with two different guns. Grissom wonders why Jin wanted to hurt Cora. He says he guesses he was just sick of them being around.
Grissom calls in the info to Brass who informs Grissom that Sung left prison with a 9 MM. (Apparently you check out with what you checked in with). They don't think Sung had time to get off a shot. (The kid looks a little too serene, now I'm thinking the twist is he shot everybody.)
Grissom treats Sung's clothes to finds evidence that he did carry a gun in the waistband. Riley wonders if Cora wasn't packing too. She pulls out Cora's purse, gives it a spray to find evidence of a gun. Riley advances a theory and then we see it: cut to a shot of Cora grabbing a gun from her purse on the basement bed and heading to the party and shooting Sung to get her son back. And Sung propping himself up and shooting her back. Grissom says that's not what the kid said. Riley says it makes sense to blame the gangbanger when your whole family is dead.
To settle the matter they take Park back to the scene and re-enact it with his help and a trio of mannequins which he moves into position. Grissom asks if his uncle or mother have a gun, he says no. He asks if anyone fell down before the shooting. Riley thinks he's lying since the positions don't match with the shooting trajectories. Grissom asks him to show him how Jin shot his mother. Jin turns the mannequin and raises the arm and describes it. It becomes clear that Park shot her based on the lower position of his arm and we see a version that works with that scenario: Cora shooting Sung, and Park crying over the body, finding the gun, and shooting his mother.
Grissom reports this to Brass who says it makes sense. They don't think Jin had anything to do with shooting. Grissom reasons that Park had no control over his life until he shot that gun.
The CPS investigator dresses him and he's taken off to juvie, which Brass thinks may be the best thing for him since he'll get care there and be away from the doctor. Grissom says he's sorry they solved this one.
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