Haunted (Season 6, Episode 10)
Premise: After a shooting makes him a hero, Fin is confronted by a mother whose daughter he abandoned while undercover, and sets out to find the grandson she never knew she had.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 6, Episode 10
- 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), ME Dr. Melinda Warner (Tamara Tunie), Chief of Detectives Muldrew (John Schuck)
- Guest stars
- Nicholas Gonzalez as Mike Sandoval, Jeannetta Arnette as Sandra Knowles, Ernest Waddell as Ken Randall, Emma Myles as Lizzie Jones, Gene Silvers as T.D. Beeman
- Director
- Juan J. Campanella
- Writers
- Amanda Green
Summary
“Haunted” opens at dawn after an all-night stakeout, when Fin steps into a bodega at 115th Street and Lexington Avenue for coffee just as two 16-year-olds rob it. One kills the counterman with a submachine gun; Fin shoots both robbers while shielding a small boy and is badly wounded. Reporters claim the second teenager was unarmed, and his hands show no gunshot residue, but a hidden security camera reveals him drawing a gun that flew over a freezer case as he fell. Fin survives surgery. Benson brings his son, Ken Randall, to the hospital, and Fin admits he put his work ahead of his family.
Back at the squad, Sandra Knowles accuses Fin of having put a gun to her head when, undercover as a bodyguard for cocaine dealer Vance Dennis, he drove her away from her daughter, Tricia, the dealer’s girlfriend. Fin’s old handler, Joey Bosco, says Tricia later informed on Dennis and turned down protection, and Dennis, now in Attica, hints that she is dead. Narcotics lends Fin a young detective, Mike Sandoval, and after a buy-and-bust, dealer Fat Tony says Dennis had two of his men kill Tricia with a deliberate overdose in an abandoned building. Her body, buried unidentified on Hart Island, is matched through a First Communion keepsake, and Warner finds a C-section scar: Tricia had a baby.
Against Cragen’s wishes, Fin hunts for the boy, Austin, off the books, with Novak agreeing to subpoena hospital records. Tricia’s prenatal clinic says she got clean and had a healthy son, and the diner where she worked says her friend Lizzie Jones took Austin after Tricia vanished. An informant says Lizzie is a shoplifter who uses a stroller and lives with T.D. Beeman, a dealer. At Beeman’s house in Kingsbridge, Sandoval sets off a booby trap, and the bomb squad finds supplies for cooking crystal meth. Mapping thefts of cold medicine, the squad locates Lizzie, and Fin presses her into revealing that Austin is with Beeman at his sister’s day care, where he cooks.
Spoiler, the ending: Instead of waiting for a hazmat team, Fin and Sandoval go in as the day care children are led out and find Beeman cooking with Austin there. Beeman tries to leave with the boy, but Sandoval takes him down. After decontamination, Fin brings Austin to his grandmother. No one is charged on screen in Tricia’s death.
Why it stands out
- Ernest Waddell makes his first appearance as Fin’s son, Ken Randall, who uses his mother’s surname.
- Fin’s past as an undercover narcotics detective, when he went by the name Terry Brown, drives the story.
- Nicholas Gonzalez debuts as narcotics detective Mike Sandoval, who returns later in the season.