One ‘Miami’ CSI Gets ‘Blown Away’

A storm endangers the lives of several CSIs and scatters the evidence from a murder scene in the third episode of CSI: Miami’s upcoming tenth season. (Major spoilers after the jump!)

According to CSI Files sources, “Blown Away” finds Walter and Ryan responding to a call at a trailer park. Someone reported a murder 30 minutes ago, but the trailer park has been evacuated for an hour due to a tornado warning in the area. They head into the home and find the body of 19-year-old Ellie, who was beaten to death. She is lying in the middle of a room that looks as if it has been ransacked. A golf bag is overturned nearby, its contents scattered across the floor.

Unfortunately for the CSIs, mother nature has a nasty surprise in store for them. A tornado rips through the trailer park, nearly taking Ryan with it. Luckily, he comes through relatively unscathed, but Ellie’s body is gone. They need to bring in dogs to find their victim and any evidence that was carried away by the storm. One of the dogs picks up on a scent and leads the CSIs to a man named Mike, who is scavenging goods from the wreckage—including the golf bag from Ellie’s house and a strange metal dish.

Another dog leads the team to a tree, and they discover that Ellie has been impaled on the highest branches. Dr Loman uses a cherry picker belonging to the power company to get the body down, cutting the branches with a chainsaw. Despite the damage caused by the storm, Loman is able to identify the cause of death: Ellie was hit repeatedly with a blunt force object, and their murder weapon could very well be one of the golf clubs Ryan and Walter saw near the body. Loman adds that Ellie was in a relationship. There’s a Claddagh ring on her finger, and the heart is pointing upward—she was in love.

Ellie’s parents rush to the scene, and they can’t believe their daughter is dead. Ellie lives on campus at Dade University, and they didn’t hear her come in the night before, so they didn’t even think to check her room before they evacuated. She was sleeping several feet away as they tried to decide what to take with them, and they had no idea their most precious possession was being left behind. They also had no idea Ellie was in a relationship.

The strange metal dish belongs to a pair of storm chasers, who guessed that the storm would hit this area and called it in so the trailer park could be evacuated. They left the dish behind, and it has a camera installed. The footage is damaged, but they give it to the CSIs, and Walter is able to restore it. He has to start at the end, seeing the destruction in reverse and the moment he and Ryan arrived at the scene. Continuing backwards, they see another car in front of Ellie’s home, and the license plate leads them to Travis, a young man attending Dade University on an ROTC scholarship. He and Ellie were in a secret relationship, and he was in the trailer park around the time of her murder.

Please note that the above plot details have not been confirmed by CBS, Alliance Atlantis or Bruckheimer Films, and until such time you should treat this information as you would any other rumour. The above information comes from early script drafts and the details of the episodes are liable to change before the episodes are shown.

“Blown Away” is expected to air October 9 on CBS.