Raw (Season 7, Episode 6)
Premise: A sniper’s attack on a schoolyard leads the squad to a neo-Nazi gun dealer and a skinhead shooter, and finally to a motive inside the dead boy’s own home.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 7, Episode 6
- 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), Defense Attorney Barry Moredock (John Cullum)
- Guest stars
- Marcia Gay Harden as Star Morrison / FBI Agent Dana Lewis, J.C. MacKenzie as Brian Ackerman, Cody Kasch as Kyle Ackerman, Joel Marsh Garland as Brannon Lee Redding, John Rubinstein as Judge Schuyler
- Director
- Jonathan Kaplan
- Writers
- Dawn DeNoon
Summary
“Raw” opens with a sniper firing on a schoolyard on West 160th Street before classes begin. Jeffrey Whitlock, a Black boy, is killed, and classmates Danny Kohler, who is Jewish, and Annabelle Paoletti are wounded. Jeffrey had been adopted a year earlier by Mark and Janice Whitlock, a white couple; Mark is a guard at Rikers. Early leads go nowhere. A classmate’s mother keeps an unregistered pistol in an unlocked drawer, and one girl’s fear of a neighbor reveals that he has been molesting her; her uncle beats the man unconscious, but he was at the dentist during the shooting.
Munch finds the sniper’s rifle hidden on a rooftop across the street. It was sold for cash, with no background check, by Gun Ho!, a Staten Island store owned by Brian Ackerman, and the buyer signed as “G. Rockwell,” the name of the American Nazi Party’s founder. In the basement Munch and Fin find Ackerman’s home-schooled son, Kyle, 16, and a family friend, Star Morrison, packing hate literature; Star hits Munch and is arrested. Ackerman leads a white-supremacist group called Raw, the Revolutionary Aryan Warriors, and Kyle runs a website of racist games. Sweat on the rifle scope yields the DNA of Brannon Lee Redding, a skinhead freed from Rikers days before the purchase.
Redding claims the gun was stolen, then takes Novak’s offer of 25 years to life with the counts running concurrently. Judge Schuyler rejects the deal after Redding’s slur-filled allocution and offers consecutive terms instead, and Star is jailed for contempt after a protest from the gallery. Redding then says Ackerman gave him the rifle, Jeffrey’s addresses and his school photo, describing the boy as the son of a white guard who had betrayed his race. Barry Moredock takes Ackerman’s defense, and Star refuses to testify even with immunity. As Redding testifies, Kyle opens fire in the courtroom; Star calls out that she is a federal agent, and Kyle is killed.
Spoiler, the ending: Star is FBI agent Dana Lewis, five months undercover. Munch and Stabler are among the wounded, and Stabler tells Benson that Kathy has filed for divorce. Raw member Christopher Rawlings used a fake badge to bring the guns past security; Judge Schuyler and a court officer are dead, and Ackerman calls his son a hero. Lewis’s raid on a skinhead bomb plot turns up records of a pledge from Mark Whitlock: a third of the $750,000 from two life insurance policies on Jeffrey. Confronted with the evidence that they supplied the photo, the Whitlocks insist they are not racists; they say they needed the money.
Why it stands out
- Marcia Gay Harden plays FBI agent Dana Lewis, undercover as white supremacist Star Morrison; she returns to the role three more times in the series.
- Stabler reveals that his wife, Kathy, has started divorce proceedings and that he has not yet signed the papers.
- John Cullum returns as defense attorney Barry Moredock.