Hate (Season 5, Episode 13)
Premise: A Muslim woman is raped and burned alive in Manhattan, and when a second Muslim victim dies the same way, the detectives hunt a killer driven by hatred.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 5, Episode 13
- Starring
- Det. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Det. Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni), Det. John Munch (Richard Belzer), Det. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Capt. Donald Cragen (Dann Florek), ADA Casey Novak (Diane Neal), Dr. George Huang (BD Wong), ME Dr. Melinda Warner (Tamara Tunie)
- Guest stars
- Reynaldo Rosales as Sean Webster, Barry Bostwick as Oliver Gates, Linda Emond as Dr. Emily Sopher, Donnie Keshawarz as Joshua Feldman, Matt Salinger as Seth Webster
- Director
- David Platt
- Writers
- Robert Nathan
Summary
“Hate” opens with a woman running down a Manhattan street in flames. Warner finds that she was raped with a metal pipe and doused with fuel oil, and a henna design under her boots and the label from her burned purse send Benson and Stabler to Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, where a henna artist names her as Mira Elbisi. Her husband, El-Shani, who publishes an Arab American newspaper with his mother, Jazlyn, gives an alibi that does not match hers. A neighbor saw Mira with a split lip after a fight, and the detectives learn she was in love with Joshua Feldman, a Jewish man she met through interfaith work, and meant to leave her husband. Traces of fuel oil in Jazlyn’s trunk add to the suspicion, though she says it was for the office boiler.
Then Tariq Assad, a 27-year-old Egyptian engineering student, is attacked the same way near a mosque at 94th Street and Second Avenue. Both victims had sat on an Interfaith Council panel about modernizing Islam, and the event’s security video shows a man in a Donaghue Heating Service jacket standing close to each of them. He is Sean Webster, a heating-oil truck driver, who runs when the detectives come for him. Over hours of questioning he describes the crimes as if someone else committed them and rails against Arabs; Stabler plays along, and Fin provokes him into an outburst. His apartment yields a white-supremacist survival manual and cleaning fluid containing the benzene found on both victims.
Webster’s lawyer, Oliver Gates, an opponent of hate-crime laws, is preparing to attack the confession when Webster beats a Muslim prisoner to death at Central Booking. Gates responds with an insanity defense built on biology, arguing that Webster’s genes left him unable to control his hatred. Neurobiologist Dr. Emily Sopher presents brain scans in court, and Huang counters with scans of a rabbi and a minister that react the same way to images of their own enemies. Testifying, Webster says his father died fighting in Desert Storm, and Novak has the detectives check.
Spoiler, the ending: The father, Seth Webster, is alive. He left Sean’s mother for an Arab woman he met in Kuwait and now has a second family in Detroit. Novak sets her terms: guilty pleas to three counts of second-degree murder with consecutive sentences. When she then brings him in, Sean erupts in threats against him and his new family. Before the case goes further, the detectives learn that the prisoner Webster killed had friends, and that Webster has been stabbed to death in the yard at Rikers.
Why it stands out
- Barry Bostwick guest-stars as defense attorney Oliver Gates, with Linda Emond as neurobiologist Dr. Emily Sopher.
- Reynaldo Rosales plays the killer, Sean Webster, and Matt Salinger plays his father, Seth.