CSI: SSS

Gil Grissom has spent the last fifteen years helping Las Vegas move from #14 to #2 in the US Crime Lab rankings.  He grew up in Marina Del Rey, California.  His mother ran an art gallery in Venice, and his father was in the import/export business, dealing primarily with communist China.  Grissom's parents divorced when he was five.  At eight or nine, Grissom began riding his bike out to the beach everyday to collect dead seagulls, possums and anything else he could find.  He would bring the remains home and conduct autopsies, slowly teaching himself the ins and outs of death.  As a teenager, Grissom became known to local authorities, who employed him from quick autopsies on dead animals like cats and dogs.  By age sixteen, Grissom was an unofficial intern for the LA County morgue.  He worked his way through college, and at age 22 went to work full time as the youngest coroner in the history of LA County.  Eight years later, a headhunter recruited him to run the Field Services office in Las Vegas.  His philosophy about his work has always been: "if you want to learn about forensics, master everything else first."  While others may have a reason for being a CSI, for Grissom the job is not about choice.  Grissom could no more work in another profession than a fish could stop swimming.  CSI is not a job for Grissom, it's an expression of who he is as a person, the perfect synthesis of personality and profession.  Grissom's specialty is entomology.

Sara Sidle was born and raised an hour and a half outside San Francisco on Tamales Bay.  An only child of ex-hippies running a bed and breakfast, Sara always needed a bigger stage.  Everything about her as a child was out sized: her intelligence, her energy, her curiosity.  Unlike her parents, Sara always maintained perfect self-discipline; the roles were reversed for Sara and her parents.  They kept telling her to take it easy, and she kept coming up with business models for how they could take their B & B public and then franchise the brand.  Sara was pretty much all-or-nothing in high school, and as talented as she was, grace didn't come with the package.  The other kids resented her, and she did nothing to ease the resentment.  At eighteen, Sara found a place where she could be at home.  She went to Harvard and enjoyed four of the best years of her life.  She took as many classes as she could.  She went to as many parties as she could.  And she finally dated.  Not well, but at least she tried.  She attended graduate school in theoretical physics before realizing that she was too frenetic for a life of scholarly contemplation.  One year later, she got a job in the San Francisco coroner's office and spent five years there gaining an unofficial education in forensic science.  After that, she transferred to the San Francisco crime lab before being contacted by Grissom, who asked her to come to Las Vegas.  Like any tragic figure worth her salt, Sara has a single flaw: people.  She can solve any problem except the problem of other people and how she's supposed to relate to them.  As a result, she hides in her job.  She pursues her career rigorously, perhaps more so than any of the other CSIs, partly because she's still rebelling against her parents' casual approach to social obligations, and partly because she's afraid of what she'd find out about herself if she ever slowed down.   As a CSI, Sara's specialty is materials and element analysis.

Catherine Willows was born on a ranch in western Montana.  She was the eldest daughter of fourth-generation ranchers, but the rural life was never for her. Catherin could ride before she could walk, but horses were always for taking her away from work.  She left home the first time as a sixteen-year old.  She lived in Seattle for a year with her would-be rock-star boyfriend, seeking out a living as a waitress.  When he left her for an older woman, she went home, only to find home wasn't there anymore.  Her parents had been forced to sell their ranch and had moved to town.  They made it clear that Catherine was on her own.  The next stop for Catherine was Las Vegas.  She waited tables until she discovered a much more lucrative line of work: exotic dancing.  The men loved her, and the money poured in.  Catherin spent it all on school and on the aspiring career of her music-producing boyfriend, Eddie.  Dating turned to engagement, which turned to marriage.  When their turbulent relationship ended, Eddie left her with ten dollars in the bank, a coke habit and a small child, Lindsey.  Catherine pulled it together for her own sake and for the sake of her daughter.  She didn't become a CSI because she wanted to right the wrongs of the world; she became a CSI because it makes her feel like a kid solving puzzles.  She loves the challenge, and she loves the buzz of working a case.  It's a high for her, and anything that makes Catherine feel as good as she does can't be all that bad.  Catherine's specialty is blood splatter analysis.

Warrick Brown is the only member of the CSI team born and raised in Las Vegas.  To this day, Warrick has never met his father.  His mother passed away when he was seven, leaving him in the care of his maternal grandmother.  He grew up in a strict household, and that meant he kept his teenage job as a runner secret from his grandmother.  Warrick was quite literally born to live in Las Vegas.  He loves the casinos, loves the action, and loves the pulse of the city.  He can move just as easily through the Clark County Courthouse as he can through the Sports book at Hard Rock.  To let off steam, he DJ's at clubs run by his friends and writes his own songs.  Spending his whole life in Las Vegas means Warrick knows at least one person in every bar, club and hotel in the city.  He's connected, and he uses those connections to move between his worlds.  He went through a lot of women in his early twenties, but the first time he fell in love, the woman broke his heart.  He now looks at women with a cautious eye.  Warrick knows how all the games are played in Las Vegas and is aware of the universal truth of the city: the only one who wins consistently is the house, because the odds are stacked.  Warrick's got enough of a rebel in him to challenge those odds, and enough of a realist in him to know the only one watching out for him is him, so he'll cut his losses to fight again another day if need be.  Warrick's specialty is audio/visual analysis.

The youngest child in a family of seven, Nick Stokes was born into law enforcement.  His father worked as the state DA before being appointed to the bench.  Two years ago, Nick's father was appointed to the Texas state Supreme Court.  Nick's mother has spent her entire adult life working as a public defender.  They have been happily married for 45 years.  With one brother and five sisters, Nick had a lot of people looking out for him.  Maybe that's why everything feels so personal to him.  He has no distance from his work because he's always been close to people.  Where Sara struggles with relationships, Nick can't help himself: being with and around people is so easy for him.  What's hard is balancing the unspoken but competing perspectives of his parents.  He wants to live up to their expectations and becoming a CSI was one way of finding a compromise.  As a CSI he's objective.  He still has a social responsibility to uphold, but does his job without agenda.  The evidence speaks, and everyone has to respect what it says, from public defenders to judges on the bench.  Nick could still be in Texas, but he chose to move two states over.  There's a part of Nick that loves his family, but there's a part of him that wants to be on his own, to lay down his own roots and establish his own identity.  However, he's finding that roots don't take quickly.  Growing them is a slow process fraught with mistakes, and Nick isn't finished.  As a CSI, Nick's specialty is hair and fiber analysis

Ever since he picked up his first amateur chemistry kit when he was seven, Greg Sanders has wanted to be a scientist.  Even though he was told that science was supposed to be a hobby for the pasty-faced and romantically-challenged that did not dissuade him from joining the Science Club in high school, or from majoring in Chemistry in college.  He had always balanced lab work with athletics, studying with flirting, and computer work with dating.  Addicted to the pursuit of knowledge, Greg has been on a quest to learn all he can about the scientific breakthroughs of the past centuries.  And discovering and naming a brand-new theory or element after himself wouldn�t hurt, either.