Sins of the Father (Season 24, Episode 20)
Premise: The shooting of a garage mechanic who was once a promising chemist leads to a drug boss testing a new fentanyl, and the DA’s office leans on the boss’s law-abiding son to bring him down.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 24, Episode 20
- Detectives
- Det. Vincent Riley (Reid Scott), Det. Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy), ADA Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi), DA Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn)
- Guest stars
- David Castro as Ernesto Ruiz, Jaime Gomez as Antonio Ruiz, Zachary Keller as Eli Randall, Marcus Ho as Professor Tao Chen, Wai Ching Ho as Li Tan
- Director
- Sharon Lewis
- Writers
- Scott Gold & Ajani Jackson
Summary
The Investigation
“Sins of the Father” centers on garage mechanic Sunny Zhen, shot in the head at close range at work; his wallet is left but his phone is gone, and his boss, Leo Brooks, saw a man in a black hoodie with a green design flee. Li Tan, who runs a mahjong parlor, says Sunny’s father fled to China with $40,000 from her lending club, a debt Sunny was repaying. Sunny had been a Hudson University chemistry student until an anonymous tip, which his supervisor, Prof. Tao Chen, calls false, accused him of spying for China.
Fellow student Eli Randall, whose faked results Sunny had exposed, admits wrecking Sunny’s career but says he visited only to offer money and was waved off at gunpoint by a man beside a red BMW. The car belongs to Ernesto Ruiz, a middle school teacher whose father, Antonio, is a drug dealer known for making his own fentanyl. Sunny’s blood is found in the BMW along with DNA from Ernesto’s cousin Omar Nuñez, one of Antonio’s soldiers. Arrested after a chase, Omar is shown Sunny’s text, sent hours before the shooting, saying he wanted out. Omar refuses to cooperate and insists Ernesto had no part in it.
The Trial
Baxter wants Antonio, citing thousands of fentanyl deaths in the city last year, but the evidence against Ernesto is thin. Omar is then stabbed to death at Rikers by a lifer he had never met. The killer’s daughter, Melanie South, admits she was paid $5,000 by Alfred Arroyo, a Ruiz lieutenant, to deliver Omar’s name. Arroyo opens fire when Riley and Shaw stop him, and they kill him. His car’s GPS leads to shipping containers holding a fentanyl lab and thousands of pills, and thirteen weighted bodies are pulled from the water nearby, people the crew used to test a stronger drug.
Omar’s texts show he asked Ernesto for a ride to assault a man over a fake necklace, which gives the office grounds to charge Ernesto with felony murder. Maroun calls it punishing a son for his father’s crimes, but Baxter says they have no choice. Facing life in prison and shown the bodies, Ernesto agrees to wear a wire, hoping to clear his father of owning VexCore, the company that bought the lot.
Spoiler, the ending: At a family gathering, Ernesto slips away and takes bank statements, and Antonio catches him. Ernesto demands to know whether his father had Omar killed and tested drugs on people, and officers storm in as Antonio cries that everything he did was for his son. Ernesto enters witness protection and asks to see his mother first, but he is told she is not coming.
Why it stands out
- The episode has no courtroom scenes: instead of a trial, the case ends with Ernesto wearing a wire against his father and entering witness protection.
- Maroun reveals that the Lebanese restaurant her father ran never made money and that his sportsbook in the back paid for her law school.
- Riley and Shaw kill a Ruiz lieutenant in a shootout, and the case turns up thirteen people who died testing an experimental fentanyl.