Poppin' Tags

Infobox Television episode | Title = Poppin' Tags
Colour =
Series =
Season = 6
Episode = 20


Caption=
Airdate = April 13, 2006
Production =
Writer = Dustin Lee Abraham
Director = Bryan Spicer
Guests = Travis Barker (Hi-Def)
Method Man (Drops)
Shanna Moakler (J-Lady)
Page Kennedy (Jessie "Dollar" Cleveland)
Vincent Duvall (Marc Trent)
Prev = Spellbound
Next = Rashomama

Poppin' Tags is the twentieth episode of the of the American crime drama "" which is set in Las Vegas, Nevada. It originally aired as episode 137 on April 13, 2006.

Plot

Three unidentified teenagers are murdered while stapling posters to wooden light posts. Warrick and Nick arrive and surmise that the three teenagers are victims of a gang-related drive-by shooting. Warrick finds a cylinder at the crime scene that belongs to a car. He and Nick trace the serial number back to the place of purchase. There they get an address which leads them to the car owner. He begins to act hostile towards the CSIs, and Nick unholsters his gun telling him to raise his hands. The teenager threatens the CSIs by implying he may have a gun pointing at Warrick. Warrick then hits the car owner with the door of the car thus knocking him off balance. The police arrive at the scene almost immediately afterwards and search the suspect. They find that the suspect was bluffing.

Catherine then goes to the suspect's house searching for his brother who allegedly uses the car frequently. The brother is found unconscious in a closet. He had contracted tetanus after being stapled in the calf by one of the victims at the original crime scene.

Back in the lab, Sara confirms that the car and the teenagers were present at the crime scene, and then the team starts discussing about what the teenagers were doing at the time of their death. Grissom suggests checking what the kids were stapling. Greg and Brass trace the posters stapled to a printer, which leads them to discover that the dead kids were sticking posters of the rapper Dollar in a bikini. A video is also discovered that shows Dollar being forced at gun point to pose wearing the bikini.

When Brass and Nick go looking for the rapper, they find him still wearing the bikini, tied and locked in his own trunk. He then tells them how his kidnapping happened and that many people in town want to see him dead. One of the victim's mothers appears and tells the CSIs that her daughter had joined a street team" for the rapper Hi-Def (Travis Barker). Sofia, Nick and Sara go looking for Hi-Def eventually finding him at a fashion party where Obie Trice and Akon are performing the song "Snitch." Hi-Def's assistant (Shanna Moakler) recognizes the three victims as members of their street team, and Nick gets two of Dollar's street team members' fingerprints, which match the ones found inside the car used for the shooting. They both confess to being in the car but explain that it was Moris (the teenager with tetanus) who was the one doing all of the shooting, not them. Apparently, Moris was a hardcore Dollar fan and couldn't take seeing his idol humiliated with those posters. This matches the evidence found by the CSIs.

Nick analyzes the video of Dollar in a bikini and finds out that it wasn't the dead street team members who made the video, but one of Dollar's street team members, Dante. Dante's sister had appeared in a video made by Dollar called "Girls Gone Nuts," and when Dante's father found out, he assaulted her with whatever he had in his hands - his car keys - causing permanent scars all over her body. Dante couldn't find his father, so to avenge his sister's humiliation, he decided to join Dollar's street team in order to gain his trust and cause him the same humiliation.

See also

*

External links

*imdb episode|id=0777319
*Tv.com episode|id=663345
* [http://www.csifiles.com/episodes/csi/season6/poppin_tags.shtml "Poppin' Tags"] at CSI Files