Episode 3, Wet Foot/Dry Foot, CSI: Miami

Episode 3, Wet Foot/Dry Foot, CSI: Miami

Summary of the Plot, Major Events and Critical Assessment of Major Issues Covered

The episode begins with people in a boat listening to news mentioning thunderstorms in the Florida straits which caused damage to buoys. The people on the boat are fishing, and they catch a shark with a human body part in it. The CSI: Miami team then tries to determine whether it is a murder or not. The body has a bullet wound on it. The body is then taken to the crime lab. The team talks to the boat captain to get more details on the location where the shark was caught and retrieves their chart. An analysis of the body part in the lab reveals an enlarged gynecomastia breast with no armpit hair and pronounced hair on the knuckles. At this point, they cannot determine whether the victim is a man or a woman. They then conclude that the victim was shot at close range. The victim also has a tattoo that is connected to Christian resistance catholic leaders in Cuba. This means that the victim was a political prisoner. This leads them to determine that if the victim were living in the US, he would have been processed at Krome detention; therefore, his fingerprints would be in file. However, if he were coming to the US, they would have no record of his prints. The victim was making a freedom run, and he was not alone on the boat. The team then teams up with the Coast Guard to try and locate the boat that the victim was in. They find an abandoned boat with no identification number. They also see blood on the boat and a bullet embedded on the boat, which is taken to the lab for processing.

The bullet from the victim’s torso and that from the boat are matched, and the caliber identified. The blood from the boat also matched the blood from the torso, which is from a male. However, flesh tissue from the bullet recovered from the boat matches a female. This means that there is another victim. The boat also has a vault that is stashed with cocaine. A dead female victim is found having been shot in the leg. The victim is tied with rope to reduce blood flow from the wound. It is also determined that the victim had come from Cuba, and was, therefore, probably in the boat too. Two members of the team then go and talk to Cuban nationals. They show one of then the necklace, and she identifies the victim as Elena, her niece.

The team also question the boat captain and tell him that it is a crime to have a secret compartment in a boat. He says that he owns a gun which was stolen. The gun was also matched to the bullets used on the two bodies. The captain was moving cocaine and picked up immigrants for extra cash. However, the storm meant that they had to get off the boat, and when the captain told everyone to get off the boat, Pedro tries to save his sister. He shoots her to try to save her life because he knows that if a person needs medical attention, they have to be taken to hospital. They had been floating in the water for long, and he believed that this was the only way to get her to stay in America. However, the plan did not work, and she ended up dying because the Coast Guard did not find her. Pedro is then offered a deal of testimony for citizenship.  I think that all of the events in the episode are realistic and that the investigations team correctly analyzes their evidence to determine that the two victims are related before even doing an analysis. The fact that they discover that the same gun was used to shoot Elena and John Doe is also fascinating as it enabled them to link the shooting to the boat. Horatio was even justified in trying to question Pedro as soon as he saw him because this would have solved the case very early.

Forensic Issues Covered in the Episode

An analysis of the female victim’s wound also reveals a synthetic based material that does not match her clothing. The material is from John Doe, meaning that they were shot using the same gun. DNA from the rope which tied female victim reveals that it was tied by somebody else. The team determines that the epithelial from the rope belongs to someone closely related to Elena (Pedro, her brother), who could have tied the rope. In real life, trace materials such as the synthetic-based material on Elena’s wound are also used to identify who they belong to using trace analysis in the lab. Humans also leave traceable DNA from ropes. The DNA on the ropes is also analyzed for gender, origin, and other features such as race and age (Dumache et al., 2016).

The team finds the gun used to shoot both the John Doe and Elena in Pedro’s room, which they determine by using ballistics to tie it to the victims who were shot. The bullet recovered in John Doe’s torso, and that from the boat are matched using an imaging technique to identify that it was the same bullet. In real life, ballistics are also used to determine the origin of bullets used in crime and link them to the originating gun (Warlow, 2016).

Characters

Pedro

Captain Bob

Elena

John Doe

Detective Calleigh Duquesne- a ballistics specialist who specializes in DNA recovery.

Detective Eric Delko- a fingerprint and drug specialist.

Detective Timothy Speedle- a specialist in impressions and trace.

Lieutenant Horatio Caine- director of the MDPD Crime Lab

Lieutenant Megan Donner – Horatio’s partner.

Assistant Chief Medical Examiner Alexx Woods- the coroner at Miami Dade County hospital.

References

Dumache, R., Ciocan, V., Muresan, C., & Enache, A. (2016). Molecular DNA Analysis in Forensic Identification. Clinical laboratory, 62(1-2), 245-248.

Warlow, T. (2016). Firearms, the law, and forensic ballistics. CRC Press.