Another Law & Order: Organized Crime Fatality?! This Job Should Come With a Surgeon General’s Warning

Warning: This post contains spoilers from Law & Order: Organized Crime Season 4, Episode 10.

Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be young, male Organized Crime Control Bureau detectives.

As much as I wanted that body in the back of the pickup truck in last week’s Law & Order: Organized Crime to be a fakeout, this week’s episode confirmed the grim truth: Det. Samir “Sam” Bashir (played by Abubakr Ali) is most certainly dead, killed by those in charge of the heroin operation in which Joe Jr. also is involved.

Sam’s murder is brutal. It’s a huge loss. It’s also the third time in the show’s short history that this has happened: Someone joins Sgt. Ayanna Bell’s team at the start of a season and is deceased before the finale’s credits roll. And people keep showing up for the job! Isn’t word getting around the New York Police Department by now?

To be fair, Season 1’s casualty, Det. Diego Morales (played by Michael Rivera), had a heavy hand in his own demise. In the Season 1 finale, we learned that the cop took a $2 million bribe from Richard Wheatley in exchange for killing Wheatley’s ex-wife, Angela, so she couldn’t testify against him. But Diego was kinda bad at it; his first attempt (poisoning) failed, and when he posed as a medical professional to finish the job, Bell, Stabler and Olivia Benson caught him at the hospital. (Read a full recap.) He didn’t have to die, but he knew that he also would never go free. So he didn’t let up in the shootout; when Bell eventually shot him in self-defense, it was a clear case of suicide-by-cop.

Maybe Sam’s death hits so hard because it follows so closely on the heels of Det. Jamie Whelan’s death in the Season 3 finale. (Read a full recap.) You remember Jamie (played by Brent Antonello), right? Tall, Stabler fan, had a flirty, budding romance going with Jet? It felt like we — and Jet — were just getting to know him when he took a bullet as the team closed in on Shadowërk creator Kyle. (After that monologue about the Canadian rail trip he’d planned, though, you just knew that young Whelan’s minutes were numbered.) Though Jamie didn’t die in the field, his spinal injury left him severely paralyzed and staring down a lifetime of never being able to move his body again.

In the hospital, a despondent Whelan was unwilling to hear Jet’s pleas for him to keep up hope (as well as to return her declaration of love). He asked his friend and colleague Bobby Reyes to disconnect the equipment that was keeping him alive, but a horrified Bobby refused. Eventually, though, Whelan’s father arrived at the facility. Jamie flatlined and died soon after; viewers were led to believe that his dad turned off his life-support machines, granting the wish that Reyes wouldn’t.

All we’re saying is that this is A LOT OF LOSS of characters that we were just starting to get to know/care about when they were killed off. Danielle Moné Truitt, who plays Bell, herself acknowledged the deep grief that the OCCB has gone through recently when we talked to her at the beginning of the season.

“I can’t believe that Bell would not, in her own mind — she might never ever say it out loud — but I can’t believe that she would never have to question, like, ‘Is it me?'” Truitt said at the time. “Like, ‘Is there just something in me where people I’m connected to just keep dying?’ Every time there’s a new team member, somebody is killed! You know what I mean?”

And if two is a coincidence but three makes a trend? For her next hire, the sergeant might want to think about a good publicist.