CSI begins with a young woman, Abby, and a young man, Slade, walking through a seedy part of town so he can pick up a package while she is answering texts from someone who is looking for her. He gets impatient and as he tries to take her phone, a man with a gun comes to try and rob them. Slade struggles for the gun before it goes off and as the girl watches in shock, she gets flashback of people inside a tent being shot. A police officer comes up to check on her. As she looks at the body of the man in shock, she asks to speak to Sarah Sidle.
Sarah comes over, confused, as she tells the cop about the old case where Abby’s father shot her whole family. She asks Abby if she is okay and is very concerned about her hanging around the Alphabets, especially when she finds out who she was with. Abby reveals she remembers what happened ten years earlier and that her dad is innocent.
Sarah calls someone named Joanna to come get Abby. When she goes to talk to Abby, the girl insists she remembered the smell of kerosene and that someone with a beard was the one who shot her family. Sarah is hesitant to believe her and tries to explain that the evidence told them it was her dad. Abby is upset that she doesn’t believe her.
Joanna is waiting in another room and Sarah comes to see her. She is in the process of adopting Abby, but the girl has been acting out. Joanna thanks Sarah for being part of the girl’s life since she has helped her to be where she is today, even through acting out. When a cop brings Slade past the room, Sarah goes over and warns him to stay away from Abby.
Greg goes down to see Dave, who is processing the body from the alley. He leans down to smell something and has Dave do the same. He tells Dave he’s asking because of Sarah since the girl smelled something on him that reminded her of the crime. Dave can only smell smoke and booze, so they decide to use a machine to help detect a smell.
Sarah goes through evidence from the ten-year-old case, where she has flashbacks of photographing the father’s body and the body of the mother and sister. She also remembers visiting Abby in the hospital and processing the young girl.
Greg gets Sarah’s attention and tells her there were a lot of smells on the body. When she mentions kerosene, he tells her gun cleaner was found on his body. He realizes she’s been very close to this case and she reminds him she knows about a parent killing the other parent and going into foster care. Greg notes that they’ve been friends for a long time, but she has never talked about what happened. She begins to speak when a page from Russell interrupts her.
Russell tells Sarah she has about 12 open cases and wonders why she is looking into a closed case. She tells him about Abby’s story, but he reminds her eyewitness testimony years later is unreliable and Sarah tells Cooper she noticed in the dad’s tox report there were other traces that weren’t analyzed. Cooper reminds her this will ruffle some feathers, including Doc Robbins who would have to change his ruling of suicide, as well as Ecklie. He allows Sarah to look into her but he tells her that she better end up being right.
Doc Robbins isn’t happy when he finds out what is going on. He explains his tox report showed that the father had gunshot residue on his hand and a blood alcohol level of .23. The peak he learns about didn’t indicate anything big to him, but he agrees to pull the blood sample to take a closer look. However, a search of his computer reveals the blood samples were destroyed so they have to exhume his body.
Sarah tells Abby what is going on. She mentions not being able to go to her father’s, mother’s, or sister Hannah’s funeral. Sarah wasn’t allowed to go to her own father’s. Down in the morgue, Doc tells Nick that he won’t need to do a full autopsy on Fisher’s body and he is able to get one of the organs that was kept inside.
Sarah comes up to Cooper with the results and tells him the father was given a drug to knock him out so Doc changed the suicide ruling to undetermined cause of death. She gets the okay to reopen the case and luckily, she had boxed up all the evidence since there would never be a trial. While Finn and Morgan will process the evidence, Sarah will take a step back since she is close with Abby.
Morgan recreates the entire scene, with placards showing where each person’s DNA was. Based on Sarah’s notes, they know that the killer placed Hannah in her sleeping bag after she was shot and did the same with Abby. They are hoping that the killer left his own DNA behind in the tent.
Morgan tells Sarah she got a hit off the DNA on Hannah’s sleeping bag and it came back to Garth Fogel, a registered sex offender. He had a beard just like Abby said the killer did. Henry comes in to tell the girls while he didn’t find DNA evidence that matched Fogel, he was apparently Hannah’s biological father. Sarah had known this, but someone had told her the father died in an accident. Morgan mentions that if she had a baby and the baby’s father was a sex offender, she’d also lie about it.
Nick interrogates Fogel, who claims not to know the family until Nick shows him the crime scene photos and accuses him of wanting to hurt the girls. He tells Fogel his theory of what happened, but Fogel claims he went to the family’s house as they were packing for the trip and that’s how his print got on Hannah’s sleeping bag. He didn’t follow them to the campsite.
Greg tells Sarah Fogel’s alibi was he was with his mom, but she’s been dead for five years, so they are pulling his old cell phone and credit card records to see what he was doing around that time. Sarah tells him that Abby can barely remember anything, but Greg has an idea.
Greg and Sarah take Abby to the campsite, where they set it up to look like the crime scene from ten years ago. Greg stands beside Sarah and begins video taping the scene in case they need it for court. Abby walks around, where she remembers playing with Hannah and hugging her father. As she slowly walks to the tent, she remembers seeing her sister get shot. She walks over to the side of the tent where she had been shot and remembers seeing a man with a patch on his arm. Sarah assures her she did a great job.
Finn tells Morgan about some animal blood that Henry had identified in the tent. It turns out it was elk blood and Morgan thinks it could be the animal that Abby saw on the patch. They figure that the killer could be part of a hunting club and Morgan finds a patch online for Legend Creek with a similar patch to the one Abby described.
Sarah and Morgan meet Randy Pruitt, who is the club president. When he finds out what they are there for, he’s reluctant to reveal his friends’ privacy, but Sarah shows him their warrant. They get the information from 2004 and Sarah shows the photos to Abby. When she gets to Donald Wraith’s photo, she identifies him as the one she saw.
Nick and the police go out and find Wraith’s truck. But when there is no response for him to exit his vehicle, they find he has a gun shot wound to the head. He calls Dave to the scene and they both realize the scene is staged to look like a suicide. They wonder if someone else was involved in the family massacre.
Cooper and Sarah talk since they know that Abby only remembered one man the night of the shooting. Sarah thinks Fogel is still connected and thinks maybe he had gotten Donald Wraith to help him get rid of the family to get Hannah. Sarah goes to find evidence.
Morgan goes to talk to Hodges, who found traces of resin on Wraith’s body. The mixture he found is used in construction and Morgan gets excited because she thinks it could tie the crime to Fogel. However, Hodges tells her the trace is only used in taxidermy and Morgan knows who to see.
Sarah interrogates Randy Pruitt and tells him his prints were found in the tent where the family was murdered. He claims the parents came into the shop for directions and Donald wanted to follow them so he could have “some fun” with Kathy. He went with him to stand guard and drug the dad. He claims that he put the children back in bed, but Sarah reveals the daughter survived and remembers it was Donald and she believes he pulled the trigger.
Sarah tells Abby what happened, who feels sad that she spent so many years blaming her father. Sarah assures her that her dad was a good man and loved her. Joanna comes to pick up Abby and Sarah tells Abby about a concert they can go to.
Later, Greg looks at a photo of Sarah with her dad and mentions she looks similar to him. She talks about her dad and the fact she’ll never really know what happened the night he died. Sarah also admits to being jealous that Abby can rewrite what happened to her family and she can’t. Greg mentions that she can always work on the future and that she could work things out with her mom, but Sarah isn’t sure it’s a possibility.
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