Officer Involved - Recap

Sergeant Messer looks around. Vision blurred, A dead man lying across from him staring at the stars. The streetlight shimmering off of the cobblestone street. His head hurts and he feels the pain, there is blood on his hand when he checks. As Danny begins to lift his heavy head. Coop appears behind the man on the ground. Knelt down she appeared to be looking at the body. Two officers run up to them, yelling “Sergeant” as they close in. Messer sees Officer Cooper holding his gun. He looks down and checks for the missing weapon on his leg. Coop tells Danny that she had to do it, the man had drawn a gun and she had to do it. The two other officers also tell Danny that she “Had to do it.” The man pulled out a “Nickel plated 38” and fired at the off-duty officers. Danny looks down at the dead man. He has no gun. Danny asks the 3 officers; If he had a gun then where is it?

A short time later, the sun now risen on the crime scene. The CSI team is busy at work. Combing the scene, looking for evidence. Officer Cooper is asked where the gun is but she does not know, The dead man on the street, his white button down shirt stained with a large blood spot, across his heart. There appears to be some type of hair fiber on the man’s collar. As the other officers are interviewed on the scene they all say the same thing. They do not know there where-about of the gun, they all claim that the man on the ground pulled out a gun, and they all say Coop had no choice but to fire on him. “She had to do it.”

Flash-back to the bar. Messer is there with Coop. She is telling him about a man across the bar. A man in a white shirt who she believes is a sloppy drunk and had been bothering her. Sgt. Messer escorted the man out of the bar, when he would not leave Ofc. Cooper alone. Danny is now telling Mac what happened at the bar, “The guy was getting aggressive, he wouldn’t back off.” The man in the bar now walks up to Coop and Danny; Coop tells him to leave and when he doesn’t. Danny steps in the middle of them, the man in the white shirt keeps trying to get through Danny. So Sergeant Messer is forced to “bounce” him. Danny takes the man’s arm, places it behind his back and walks the guy to the door. He then pushes him out of the bar. A few hours later the officers, as they are out on the street after leaving the bar, get into an altercation. The man in the white shirt waits for Sgt. Messer to walk by him. He stands, hiding behind a box truck with a bottle in his hand. Danny is walking a foot or two ahead of the other three officers. The man waits in the shadow of the truck until Danny passes. As he does, he feels a bottle break on the back of his head. The ground quickly approaches him. Coop yells “Sarge!” in the background and the other two officers being fighting with the man who had hit Det. Messer, and his two acquaintances.

Next thing Danny knows he is grabbing the bleeding bottle wound on his head, he takes his gun from Officer Cooper’s hand. The man on the ground, Peter, Is dead. Mac looks at Danny and informs him of his rank. As the Sergeant and boss of the officers he was with, he was responsible for what they did. On or off duty. Mack needs him to be ready, for the administrative storm that was to follow.

Mac now back outside, after his “chat” with Danny. Begins listen to what the other detectives have found. There was gun residue on Peter’s arm but it could have been transferred from Ofc. Cooper when she checked his pulse after the shooting. There were no witness accounts. Only one shot was heard fired and the gun was not at the scene, nor was it any of the places they had looked for it. (rivers, dumpsters, trash cans). Lindsay rushes up to her husband and asks him if he is “ok?” He tells her he is fine, she pulls a piece of glass out of his hair and tells him she believes they should go to the hospital. He refuses. A man walks up to the Messers and introduces himself. Lt. Adler, internal affairs. Adler tells the Messers that Danny “has!” to talk to him. Lindsay tells him they can talk when they get back from the hospital.

In the lab, some sort of stones carved in perfect cubes were found on Peter. It was also discovered that Coop had taken a perfect shot. She was calm under pressure or had enough time to relax before she took her shot. Her shot was perfectly placed. Sid tells Mac that it was either a lucky or perfect shot or that Peter could have been unarmed and been shot by mistake. In another part of the lab Adam discovers a psychotropic drug on Peter’s collar. He begins to explain what he is looking at to Lindsay but she quickly stops him. She tells him of the Conflict of interest and Adam understandingly stopped talking. Forensics tells Mack that there was another gun, justifying the claims that the officers made. The gun was still not found but it was out there. That means that Peters friends may have been able to take the gun with them but the bullet should be lodged somewhere around the crime scene. It needed to be found. Sheldon and Jo, go to the scene, after figuring out the trajectory of the bullet they followed it to a wall, it was buried in the corner of a window. Sheldon tweezes it out and they take it in as evidence.

Adler asks Danny to go over the events again. They are now in the police station, Danny is being interrogated. Coop is also being interrogated by Lt. Adler in a different room. Officer Cooper claims she was kneeling over Danny after he had been knocked out, to see if he was ok. She looked up and the man was pulling out a gun. She took Danny’s gun off of his leg and shot Peter with it. Peter “was dead before he hit the ground.”

Now at some sort of street fair there is a man covered in paintball spatter. He is insulting everybody walking by. He wants to piss them off so they pay five dollars to shoot him with paintballs. A man, looking like one of the men that Coop had remembered; did not want to be insulted. He pulled out the same gun used to shoot at Messer and Coop. He aimed at the paintball covered man’s head and pulled the trigger. Killing him in broad daylight, in a public place full of people. Sketch artists were working with witnesses to find an identity of the shooter. While going over the scene the CSI team places the man at Ofc. Messer’s shooting. Lindsay finds a fiber matching the one Adam found at the other scene. Lindsay quickly realizes she can no longer work this case due to a conflict of interest. Her husband is involved. At the lab Adam discovers the fibers are made for fishing lures.

Coop seems as if she is doing A-ok when Danny asks her. She has no feelings, Danny suggests she goes and seeks council. A few officers call Cooper away from Danny and they tell her that they all have orders to stay away from Danny. Meanwhile in Mac’s office, Lt. Adler walks in, Mac informs him that the gun used at the Messer shooting was also used to kill the Paintball Man. Mac then asks Lt. Adler if he believes going after Sgt. Messer is the best course of action. Coop took the shot, Messer is a very good police officer and Officer Cooper is a rookie. Perhaps he should turn his attention to her.

While Adam is showing Jo and Mac the fibers and fishing lures. He makes a motion with his arm Mac deduces that a persons sleeve moves up their arm as they fire a weapon, Peter didn’t have residue on his arm in the correct places. He could not have been the shooter. Coop had to have shot the wrong person. After doing some gun firing tests Mac finds out the shooter had put his arm around his “friend” and shot at the officers. He used Peter as a human shield. In the small amount of time the officers had to look up and react Coop must have shot Peter by mistake. She must have lied in her statement and she must have lied to Internal Affairs.

While being interrogated again, Mac tells Coop that Peter didn’t fire the gun. The person next to him had, Coop replied and said she fired back and it had “been a good shoot.” Lt. Adler tells her that if it was a good shoot then she wouldn’t have lied about it. Coop then accuses Sergeant Messer of telling her to lie. Danny is again being interrogated by Lt. Adler. Adler asks Messer if he had been cheating on his wife. If that had been why he defended Coop? Messer refused to accept Lt. Adlers accusations. and the Lt. tells Det. Messer that he is asking because of what Coop had told he and Mac. She had told them that Detective Messer told her to lie. Sergeant Messer replied with only a puzzled look on his face. Lt. Adler then places Danny under arrest.

At the hospital a man is in a bed with a gunshot wound. Mac knows the man was at the bar the night of the shooting, he also assumes that he was involved in the fight. After a cock and bull story about how he had come to the bar to back up his friend. He finally tells Mac the truth. He was shot by the shooter. The shooter was a friend of his friend, he had shot him and told him not to talk to the police. He was able to give a short description and the man’s name. Travis. The man did not know Travis’s last name. He also knew Travis had just gotten dumped by his girlfriend. The police have now found his name and his possible where-abouts but he cannot be found. The CSI team wonders if he has not shot anybody because he is waiting for somebody in particular. Adam finds out the fishing fibers had been from a place that also sends costumes to a burlesque house and that burlesque house happened to have an Employee named Crystal who was Travis’s ex-girlfriend.

At the burlesque house Mac and a few other officers watch the show. Its Dark and the music is overbearing. Slow and thumping while the girls move sensually to it. Mac sees Travis drinking at a table near the stage. Everything glowing green, Travis hallucinating; looking up at Crystal dancing on stage begins to stand up, he draws his gun and Mac tries to tackle him. Travis fights off Mac and the other officer yells at Travis and directs him to put down the weapon. Travis puts the gun to his head and pulls the trigger. Nothing happens and he drops the gun and is taken into custody. Now on the street Coop walks out of a building and turns, Lindsay walks up to her and starts to talk, she wants Coop to tell her that her husband had told her to lie. But Coop cannot do it. She can only walk away, her eyes pointed shamefully to the ground.

Mac walks into his office, Danny is waiting there to give his Shield and Weapon to Lt. Adler, Mac and Danny have a short friendly chat. They are interrupted by Adler standing outside. Danny attempts to give up his gun but is informed that Officer Cooper had retracted her statement and he had been cleared of all charges. Officer Cooper had also gotten fired because of it. Lindsay is working hard in the lab when she is startled by Messer. He is there to tell her, that he had been stripped of his Rank and his stripes. He was a regular Detective again. He tells his wife that he is right where he belongs, and they smile.

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