Chicago P.D. Review: You Don’t Abandon Kids

You’ll be amazed what kind of things are legal, and how much people believe the rules can be bent if they are “doing a good deed”. There a quite a few people in this week’s Chicago P.D. with good intentions, but everything they do puts the lives of innocent children in jeopardy. It’s an extremely painful reality to watch what happens to children whose fates are in the hands of adults who don’t know what they are doing. For one member of Intelligence, it’s also a wake-up call that his own family needs to be put first, no matter how much it hurts him.

Intelligence serves a warrant to a dealer named Marshall Carter. They expect to find drugs, guns, but not starving children. Make that two starved to death children, and one terrified child who eventually manages to communicate that he is from Vietnam. His name is Kwan Boa, and the poor kid thought he was coming to America to live a new life with a new family. That’s half true. Kwan did come into the country legally, adopted by a nice Chicago couple. Where the story becomes horrifying is that the mother could not handle some of Kwan’s emotional problems, and so gave him away while her husband was on a business trip. Flash forward, and Kwan is held in a storm shelter, trapped with two other boys who drank meth-contaminated water and died.

Unfortunately, giving away an adopted child is actually legal in the state of Illinois. The process, called “Re-Homing”, places adopted children in new homes if the parents feel they can no longer care for them. Atwater and Burgess go undercover as a couple to meet the Marsdens, who are the middle party for a fake website that supposedly hands over unwanted children to an undercover ICE agent named Clyde Harris. Not surprisingly, the whole operation is fake, though the Marsdens don’t know that until Kwan’s adopted father bursts in with threats for the people who hurt his child. You can tell this man genuinely wanted his child, as he asks Voight “What would you do if it were your son?” He really, really doesn’t want to know the answer to that question. The real smuggler is Clyde Dupree, who uses a dark net website to auction off children under the pictures of animals, but everyone knows what they are getting. They manage to get the rest of the kids and capture Clyde. While apprehending the guy, Voight loses his temper around Antonio, who then asks a question of Voight that can be construed as suspicious. It forces Voight to confront Antonio with what he suspects, which Antonio is insulted his both would ever think. I’m inclined to believe that Antonio is innocent on this one. It would take something major for him to turn on Voight, and this just doesn’t feel like that.

This case is just one in a long list of things that has Atwood thinking it might be time to get his siblings out of town. The neighborhood has a long memory, and they found out that Atwater’s brother Jordan testified in last week’s case. They nearly rape their little sister Vanessa. Atwood has very few choices on how to handle this, but the safest solution might be to send his brother and sister to his aunt’s home in Texas. It’s better than Jordan stealing his brother’s weapon to go after the kids who attacked his sister. Jordan feels trapped, like he has to fix a situation that his brother pushed him into. Yes, Jordan did agree to testify. But when you are a teenager, your autonomy isn’t yet your own. You still want to please adults, to follow their lead because they tell you it’s what you should do. That is a lot of responsibility to put on a child, and it’s too much for Jordan and Vanessa to handle. Voight of all people knows what you have to do to keep kids safe, which Atwater needed to hear.