Name (Season 7, Episode 7)
Premise: A child’s remains found under a new playground reopen the 1978 disappearance of four boys and lead a CSU technician back to the unsolved case that consumed her father.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 7, Episode 7
- Starring
- Det. Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni), Det. John Munch (Richard Belzer), Det. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), ADA Casey Novak (Diane Neal), Dr. George Huang (BD Wong), ME Dr. Melinda Warner (Tamara Tunie)
- Guest stars
- Paula Garcés as CSU Technician Millie Vizcarrondo, Lisa Emery as Anna Gable, Richard Bright as Robert Sawyer, Ruben Santiago-Hudson as Carlos Guzman, Madhur Jaffrey as Dr. Indira Singh
- Ripped from the headlines
- Based on Philadelphia’s “boy in the box” case, in which the body of an unidentified young boy was found in a cardboard box in 1957.
- Director
- David Platt
- Writers
- Michele Fazekas
Summary
“Name” begins when workers building a new playground find a child’s teeth and jawbone in sand trucked from a Rockland County quarry. Warner finds a bullet hole, and a lunch box dates the death to the late 1970s. Stabler, back at work after being shot, takes the case. Baseball cards and a drawing marked 148 point to School 148, which recalls the 1978 disappearance of four Puerto Rican boys: Juan Alvarez, Esteban Morales, Hector Padilla and Michael Rodriguez. The remains prove to be Juan’s. The old files were checked out by CSU technician Millie Vizcarrondo, whose late father, a fingerprint analyst, spent decades trying to identify a boy found dead in a water heater box in a vacant lot in 1970. A witness at the time saw a man and a teenage boy beside a car trunk nearby.
The families always suspected Robert Sawyer, a handyman and plumber who passed a polygraph and was alibied by his young employee, Carlos Guzman, who now refuses to talk. Sand from the 1970 evidence matches the quarry’s, though the type is common. Dr. Indira Singh reports that her patient Anna Gable claims her father killed her brother and made her help dump him in a box, but Anna’s memory is damaged by years of ecstasy use and her father died in 1961. Millie chases a 1962 baby-theft scandal at a nearby hospital, a theory the detectives doubt. Shown the half blanket found with the 1970 body, Anna recalls it being burned and cut, and she calls Sawyer’s photo “Dad.” Sawyer had lived at her family’s Rockland County farmhouse, and the remains of the other three boys are found buried on the property.
Carlos then admits Sawyer forced him, at 14, to help dump the box and threatened to kill Anna, whom Carlos loved; later Sawyer said he had killed her, and Carlos believed it for decades. He says Sawyer drugged Anna with stolen pills to make abusing her easier. Anna reveals that Sawyer is not the man’s real name. The real Robert Sawyer, an accountant, died unreported around 1968, and fingerprints identify the impostor as Sheldon Kerrick, who is arrested.
Spoiler, the ending: Kerrick has end-stage pancreatic cancer. Novak offers a guilty plea with cancer care and compassionate release if he names the boy in the box, but he says he does not remember. At the boy’s grave, a stone paid for by Millie’s father and fellow officers, Millie admits she resented the boy growing up and feels she has failed him; she is told to go easier on herself, since her father gave his life to a dead child while his living one waited at home. The boy remains unnamed.
Why it stands out
- Benson does not appear; Stabler works the case with CSU technician Millie Vizcarrondo, played by Paula Garcés.
- Richard Bright, who plays the man known as Robert Sawyer, died in 2006; this was the last of his performances released in his lifetime.
- Madhur Jaffrey guest-stars as psychiatrist Dr. Indira Singh, with Ruben Santiago-Hudson as Carlos Guzman.