Loco Parentis (Season 10, Episode 10)
Premise: A high school student is found with his throat cut after selling candy door to door, and McCoy takes the untested step of charging the killer’s father with murder.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 10, Episode 10
- Detectives
- Det. Lennie Briscoe (Jerry Orbach), Det. Ed Green (Jesse L. Martin)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston), ADA Abbie Carmichael (Angie Harmon), DA Adam Schiff (Steven Hill)
- Guest stars
- Jacob Pitts as John Telford, Robert Clohessy as Robert Telford, Julie Boyd as Sandra Telford, Ned Eisenberg as defense attorney James Granick, Teddy Alvaro as Leo Clayton
- Director
- Constantine Makris
- Writers
- Richard Sweren & Matt Witten
Summary
The Investigation
“Loco Parentis” begins when sanitation workers find 16-year-old Chris Skinner wrapped in a blanket inside two heavy-duty garbage bags, killed by a single slash from a long, curved blade. Chris had been selling candy bars for his school weightlifting club, heading for a nearby building with no doorman. The super there remembers Chris pinning a young resident, Ryan Velardi, against a wall weeks earlier, and Chris’s candy turns up in the building.
Classmates describe Chris as a sensitive loner who took up lifting to stop being picked on, and attention shifts to John Telford, who runs with Ryan’s crowd and lives down the block. Menthol ash on the bag matches a neighbor’s cigarette butts in the Telfords’ stairwell, and John’s bedroom holds a collection of martial-arts weapons, including a kama that fits the wound. Ryan says John hoped Chris would come by and called him an antigay slur, and classmate Leo Clayton describes months of bullying, including John holding a knife to his throat. In a basement storage room, detectives find a mannequin John slashed for practice, which his father, Robert, knew about.
The Trial
Judge Van Ness bars the mannequin, John’s violent writing and his history of bullying, leaving only the kama, and Ryan’s frightened mother keeps him off the stand. To revive the case, McCoy charges Robert Telford with depraved-indifference murder for buying the weapons with his credit card, so the two can be tried together and the excluded evidence becomes relevant. Defense lawyer James Granick attacks the theory by asking Briscoe whether he was to blame for his own murdered daughter’s drug dealing.
On the stand, Robert Telford defends teaching his son to fight back, then loses his temper under McCoy’s questioning, and his wife, Sandra, shouts from the gallery that he ruined their son. During plea talks she threatens to reveal what happened to the family blanket, and John admits he pulled Chris into the apartment to take his money and swung the kama after Chris hit him.
Spoiler, the ending: John’s confession sets up a plea to first-degree manslaughter, and Robert Telford accepts second-degree manslaughter and two to six years rather than face his wife’s testimony. Sandra Telford later has him served with divorce papers at Rikers.
Why it stands out
- McCoy tries an untested theory, charging a parent with murder for arming and encouraging a violent son.
- Under cross-examination, Briscoe testifies about his daughter, who was murdered before she could testify against a drug dealer.
- The defense uses a child witness and a George Washington cherry-tree lesson to argue that a son, not his father, answers for his acts.