Child's Welfare (Season 13, Episode 16)
Premise: While Benson’s half brother fights the city for his children, an abandoned newborn leads the squad to a couple who hold young women captive to bear children.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 13, Episode 16
- Starring
- Det. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Sgt. John Munch (Richard Belzer), Det. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Det. Nick Amaro (Danny Pino), Det. Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish), Capt. Donald Cragen (Dann Florek), Defense Attorney Bayard Ellis (Andre Braugher)
- Guest stars
- Michael Weston as Simon Marsden, Nicole Beharie as Tracy Harrison, Halley Wegryn Gross as Laurie, Danielle Skraastad as Magda Plasky, George R. Sheffey as Leo Barber
- Director
- Holly Dale
- Writers
- Story: Warren Leight; Teleplay: Peter Blauner & Julie Martin
Summary
“Child’s Welfare” begins with a newborn boy left in a box outside a church near Mercy Hospital. The same day, Benson’s half brother, Simon Marsden, reappears after five silent years: the city has taken his five-year-old stepson, Ty, and his baby daughter, named Olivia after Benson, from him and his fiancée, Tracy Harrison. A caseworker had noted a bruise on Ty, and days earlier an officer had Simon empty his pockets at a traffic stop and arrested him over one joint. Cragen reminds Benson that Simon’s last visit nearly cost her the badge. She turns to defense attorney Bayard Ellis, who sees profiling, since Tracy is Black.
Ellis exposes Officer Greg Wilcox’s stop record, and the drug charge is thrown out. In family court, though, Judge Shira Suarez cites Simon’s old rape arrest, keeps the children in foster care and orders him into rehab. Simon and Tracy then snatch the children from foster care, Cragen takes Benson’s phone during the Amber Alert, and Simon, now charged with kidnapping, is denied bail.
DNA shows the baby’s mother is Celia Barber, pulled into a red van at 13 three years earlier while biking near Montclair with her father, Leo. The same man fathered a boy left near a Newark hospital years before. That boy’s adoptive parents, Jenna and Will Fleming, describe a homeless young woman who claimed him in Central Park, and Munch and Rollins find her, Laurie, at a shelter. She tells Benson a couple picked her up outside Penn Station and kept her in a basement near the Hearst Building, where the man raped her repeatedly for over a year. Because he wanted no boys, they took her son after the birth and dumped her near Yankee Stadium.
Laurie recalls police radios and a gunshot one July 5. A hospital remembers a man shot in the foot that weekend, brought in by his aunt, Magda Plasky, a neonatal nurse who once worked in Newark. Magda leads the detectives to a locked basement on West 45th Street, where they find Celia with a little girl. Magda’s husband, John, the superintendent, is caught after a foot chase.
Spoiler, the ending: Celia goes home, Leo plans to seek custody of her two children, and the Flemings agree to let Laurie visit Dylan. Ellis gets Simon’s charge cut to custodial interference, a misdemeanor carrying 60 days, but Simon must drop his custody petition, move out and see the children only under supervision for three years. Tracy, represented separately, can now try to regain custody, and the wedding is put off. Simon tells Benson he thought he could get it right this time.
Why it stands out
- Michael Weston returns as Simon Marsden, Benson’s half brother, who was introduced in season 8; Cragen’s warning points back to that season, when the money Benson sent Simon was raised against her in the finale, “Screwed.”
- Andre Braugher, who played Munch’s colleague Frank Pembleton on Homicide: Life on the Street, plays Bayard Ellis, a defense lawyer conceived as a civil rights champion for Black and Latino defendants; here he works on Benson’s behalf rather than against the squad.