Home Invasions (Season 13, Episode 14)
Premise: The shooting of a gay-rights lawyer and her husband looks like a hate crime until the surviving daughter’s secret reshapes the case, while Rollins’s gambling catches up with her.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 13, Episode 14
- Starring
- Det. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Det. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Det. Nick Amaro (Danny Pino), Det. Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish), Capt. Donald Cragen (Dann Florek)
- Guest stars
- Lauren Kelly as Emmy Eckhouse, Jake T. Austin as Rob Fisher, Elizabeth Rodriguez as Carmen Vasquez, Esai Morales as Jimmy Vasquez, Tommy Flanagan as Murphy
- Director
- Jim McKay
- Writers
- Bryan Goluboff
Summary
“Home Invasions” begins when a gunman kills Joan Eckhouse, chief counsel of the New York Gay Rights Coalition, and her husband, Sidney, in their Yorkville home and leaves their 14-year-old daughter, Emmy, in surgery with a bullet in her head. A slur on the wall suggests a hate crime. Emmy’s boyfriend, Rob Fisher, blames his father for grounding him that night, since Emmy had planned to study at their place. Joan’s colleague at the coalition reveals that she and Joan were lovers and that Joan had been getting hang-up calls and felt followed.
A month earlier, two officers answered a call at the house: housekeeper Carmen Vasquez said Sidney had assaulted her, and he accused her of stealing jewelry. Both officers have since been fired for moonlighting for a bookie. Carmen, who raised Emmy, says Sidney pawned the jewelry himself to cover gambling losses, and her brother, Jimmy, a recently released armed robber turned preacher, says Sidney sent Emmy to a bar to place his bets. Jimmy’s Bible-study group gives him an alibi. The bar belongs to bookie Murphy, who has a long record of violent arrests but no convictions. Rollins, it emerges, owes Murphy $20,000. After Murphy and one of the fired officers, Anthony Parker, beat and threaten her, she confides in Fin, and the squad arrests both men. Murphy’s boss, McCourt, shows that Sidney won big the night he died, which leaves the bookies no motive. Murphy then reports Rollins’s debt, and Cragen calls in IAB, tells her about his own past drinking, and promises to get her help along with a command discipline.
Emmy wakes with no memory of the shooting. Her treatment for a genital herpes outbreak leads to tests showing that she and her father carry the same strain, and she admits Sidney had been abusing her since a ski trip the previous February. The bullet that hit Emmy went through Sidney first. Told falsely that Emmy has died, Jimmy confesses to the shooting, and Carmen says it was her idea after Joan dismissed her warnings about the abuse.
Spoiler, the ending: Jimmy’s insistence that Emmy was not supposed to be home sends the detectives back to her. In front of Rob, Emmy describes the abuse, then admits she told Carmen and Jimmy when both parents would be home, planned to be at Rob’s, and had them write the slur so it would look like a hate crime. She says she hated her mother more for knowing and letting it happen. As she is arrested, Emmy says she is free.
Why it stands out
- The case brings to light Rollins’s gambling debts, a revelation that puts her place in the squad at risk.
- Jake T. Austin plays Emmy’s boyfriend, Rob Fisher, and Esai Morales and Elizabeth Rodriguez play the Vasquez siblings.
- Tommy Flanagan plays the bookie Murphy, and Isiah Whitlock Jr. appears as a precinct captain.