Chicago PD season 7, episode 17 recap: Before The Fall
By Kari Highman
The real shooter, or not
Rojas and Atwater rolled up to pay JoJo a visit but of course he ran because this was Chicago PD. Jay Halstead (Jesse Lee Soffer) eventually chased him down, and helped Voight with interrogating him. JoJo offered up an alibi, claiming he was at a local gay club, which quickly checked out. So who was the real shooter? And why did Lamar give them the wrong name?
They couldn’t bring him in without burning Frank as the team’s informant, so Voight told Halstead and Upton to hit the streets in hopes of shaking something else loose. They went to knock on some doors but barely got started when a drive-by shooting took place. Upton and Halstead did return fire, causing the offenders’ car to crash.
Halstead stayed with the suspects, while Upton ran off to investigate a woman’s wailing screams. The woman was crying over her son Tyler, who had been killed by one of the bullets. Another dead kid because of this gang war; Intelligence was going to have to work fast if they wanted that number to stay low.
Kim Burgess (Marina Squerciati) revealed that Sean Alter was driving the car from the first shooting, and he torched his own car. Yikes. They needed to find Alter, but Voight announced that Staples from Homicide would be joining them after all. He let his team go to work, and told them that he would send Staples out to canvass.
They found a gun that matched the description of the murder weapon; hopefully the ballistics would also match. Following the trail, Intelligence discovered that Garrison had hired Alter to kill Campbell, who had been his boss. Alter and Lamar had once shared the same prison cell. Halstead found an old restaurant that Alter was known to hang around, so Intelligence was off and running again.
A tiny comedic moment took place when Rojas jimmied the lock on the door, which led Ruzek to comment, “We’ll discuss how easy that was for you later.” But what Chicago PD revealed behind it was no laughing matter; Alter had also been killed. As Staples arrived on the third murder scene of the episode, everyone knew that Lamar Garrison was definitely not a witness anymore; he was the killer, and they just had to prove it.