Criminal Minds (TV Series)

The Anti-Terror Squad (2016)

Paget Brewster: Emily Prentiss

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Quotes 

• David Rossi : [Prentiss watches Alvez and JJ talk to a survivor]  Anything?

  Emily Prentiss : He's traumatized.

  Matt Doherty : I heard him walking. Then he stopped. He was in my room. Right there. Why am I alive? Why me?

  David Rossi : Wish we had an answer for him.

  Emily Prentiss : He's right. The unsub must have known he was there. If he was in that bedroom, he would have seen the puddle, just like Alvez did.

  David Rossi : The unsub deliberately spared him.

  Emily Prentiss : But not out of compassion.

  David Rossi : He wanted them to feel the pain of losing their families.

  Emily Prentiss : I think we've inverted our victimology.

  David Rossi : We've been focused on the murdered family members. We should be focusing on the survivors.

  Emily Prentiss : They're the real victims. The ones the unsub wants to hurt.

• Penelope Garcia : I have been drilling into the social media footprint of both of our adolescent survivors.

  David Rossi : Any connection between Amanda and Matt?

  Penelope Garcia : Yeah. Stay with me while I go around here for a second. So, basically, both of their Facebook pages are just an outpouring of love and support from their peers. And it's touching, really, and it's very reassuring for the hope of our species.

  Emily Prentiss : What did you mean "basically"?

  Penelope Garcia : In between all the wonderfulness, there's a tiny tributary of nasty comments from some of their peers, saying that Matt and Amanda got what they deserved.

  David Rossi : Well, they're kids. Kids can be cruel and thoughtless.

  Penelope Garcia : Right, but we all know that cruelty is sometimes inspired by previous action, which made me wonder what Matt and Amanda might have done to provoke some of their peers to saying some of these things on their Facebooks. So I looked into their school records, and both Matt and Amanda have complaints against them for "harassing behavior".

  Emily Prentiss : They're bullies.

  David Rossi : Were they disciplined?

  Penelope Garcia : No. To paraphrase the violent Femmes song, nothing went down on their permanent record.

  Dr. Spencer Reid : So the victims were also victimizers.

  Emily Prentiss : If the unsub was bullied himself as a teenager, that could be the original narcissistic wound that's fueling his present-day rage. Turning his surrogate victimizers into victims is the point for our unsub.

  Dr. Spencer Reid : Bullying leaves lasting scars. Our unsub could be a teacher or staff member at the school who sees himself as an avenger of students who are current victims of bullying. Someone who punishes the bullies when no one else does.

  Emily Prentiss : From the unsub's point of view, the bullies themselves are responsible for the violence he's perpetrating against their families.

• David Rossi : Garcia, we need the records of every student at Pillsbury who filed a bullying complaint against Amanda Bergstrom, Matt Doherty, and Austin Settergren.

  Emily Prentiss : Also, anyone who received counseling for being bullied by those students.

  Penelope Garcia : [typing]  Wow. This is a really big pool. I've got twenty-seven names.

  Emily Prentiss : Any of those students bullied by all three?

  Penelope Garcia : No.

  David Rossi : Like Bakken said, most victims never come forward.

  Penelope Garcia : So I'm seeing the tip of a really big iceberg.

  Luke Alvez : Nobody wants to be a snitch.

  Emily Prentiss : Also, bullying is often so widespread, it's normalized.

  Jennifer Jareau : It would only amplify the unsub's feeling of powerlessness.

• David Rossi : The pool of suspects is still too big.

  Luke Alvez : Garcia, can you crosscheck the names you pulled with any mentions on social media of bullying?

  Penelope Garcia : Oh, that is a boss idea. I'm gonna do that right now, and...

  [typing] 

  Penelope Garcia : ...oh, this is interesting. I pulled up six names from my list, and they all belong to a private chat group.

  Jennifer Jareau : Some kind of bullying support group?

  Penelope Garcia : It's called the Anti-Terror Squad, but yeah, that's exactly what it is.

  Emily Prentiss : It's an apt analogy. Ongoing bullying would feel like terrorism to those experiencing it.

  Penelope Garcia : They warn each other about which stairwells and bathrooms to avoid on any given day. They walk each other to and from school. That kind of thing.

  Jennifer Jareau : I tell Henry school's a safe place, but for these kids, it's anything but.

  Emily Prentiss : Are there any mentions of retribution or payback, uh, planning?

  Penelope Garcia : No. But there's a lot of content here. I'll do a keyword search. It'll take a while.

  Emily Prentiss : Okay, so these kids took back some of their power by banding together. They call themselves the Anti-Terror Squad, so they see themselves as righteous.

  David Rossi : The unsub may be one or all six of these kids. Garcia, I need you to locate their cell phones.

  Penelope Garcia : Sure. Um...

  [typing] 

  Penelope Garcia : They're all in the exact same place. All six of them are in a classroom at Pillsbury High.

• Emily Prentiss : You're under arrest! Stand down!

  Kyle Ecklund : [grabbing Zach hostage-style]  Stay back! I've got a gun. I'll use it. You do what you have to do. I'm ready.

  [to a whimpering Zach] 

  Kyle Ecklund : Shut up!

  Emily Prentiss : Nobody's moving in, Kyle. Nobody's gonna shoot you. You are not in danger.

  Kyle Ecklund : I know that I am not getting out of here. I am ready.

  Emily Prentiss : [holstering her gun]  That's not how this has to go, Kyle. I know what happened here. I know what Austin did.

  [flashback to Kyle being tormented by Austin] 

  Emily Prentiss : I know they left you out here all night, and you weren't found until the next morning, and that nothing happened to the people who did that to you.

  Kyle Ecklund : You don't care. Nobody cares.

  Emily Prentiss : I do care. And I'm sorry. I'm sorry about what happened to you.

  Kyle Ecklund : But nothing ever changes. Mr. Bakken is a joke. Everything he does just screws everything up.

  Emily Prentiss : I know. You're right. Bakken failed you. Everybody failed you. And they made everything worse. But Kyle, what you're doing now, this makes everything so much worse, and I know you don't want to be responsible for that. I know you don't really want to hurt your friends, the only ones who truly understand what it's like. You're better than this.

• Amanda Bergstrom : I was supposed to be home by 11:00. That's my curfew. But there was a party and I stayed out all night. My mom, she was really mad at me. She texted me.

  Jennifer Jareau : Oh, sweetie, she wouldn't have stayed mad at you. Okay? Please believe that.

  Amanda Bergstrom : She said she was disappointed in me. That's the last text she sent. And I ignored it.

  Emily Prentiss : Teenagers break curfew. It's normal. I'm sure she loved you very much.

  Jennifer Jareau : Amanda, we need your help to find whoever did this. We need to ask you some difficult questions, okay?

  Amanda Bergstrom : Okay.

  Emily Prentiss : Ron Fergusson said that you new about him and your mom. Is that true?

  Amanda Bergstrom : Yeah.

  Jennifer Jareau : He said you threatened to tell your dad about the affair.

  Amanda Bergstrom : Well, that was just to keep him away from my mom. I... I didn't really want to tell my dad. I... I didn't want him to know.

  Jennifer Jareau : How come? Because of the pills?

  Amanda Bergstrom : Yeah. Yeah, after my dad broke his leg, he got addicted. And, um... it was really bad for a while.

  Jennifer Jareau : And that's when your mom started having the affair?

  Amanda Bergstrom : He was always yelling, at everybody, even Kevin. And my mom and him almost split up. Then he worked really hard to get clean. I didn't want to tell him about Ron because I didn't want him to give up. He was doing NA and everything, and he was doing really good, and then my mom even though so, and so when he got his six month chip, she broke up with Ron.

  Emily Prentiss : How did Ron feel about that?

  Amanda Bergstrom : Okay, I guess. I mean, I'm pretty sure he was already seeing somebody else. Things were just starting to get good again. I thought I was getting my family back.

  [crying] 

  Amanda Bergstrom : Why did this happen? Why is my family dead?

• David Rossi : Just got off the phone with Garcia. Fergusson's alibi checks out.

  Emily Prentiss : I can't even begin to imagine it. Her whole family gone in the blink of an eye. She's devastated.

  Luke Alvez : Fergusson seems to think that Amanda was some kind of conniving shrew.

  Emily Prentiss : Well, Amanda may well have been hostile towards him, but for good reason.

  Jennifer Jareau : She wanted her parents to stay together. Typical kid. She was candid about what went on. She was genuinely baffled by who would do this and why.

  Emily Prentiss : Agreed. That last text from her mom, that one's gonna haunt her.

  David Rossi : What's gonna happen to her now?

  Emily Prentiss : She has an aunt and uncle in Seattle. They flew in today. So it sounds like she'll be going home with them.

  Luke Alvez : We know Fergusson's way too disorganized to pull this off, so where does that leave us?

  Jennifer Jareau : Well, the family had their problems, but they were getting back on track.

  David Rossi : And yet someone wanted this family dead.

  Emily Prentiss : But it doesn't make sense that they'd be targeted by a family annihilator.

  David Rossi : What if it's not about *this* family? What if it's just about families?

  Jennifer Jareau : So the Bergstroms could be surrogates.

  Emily Prentiss : Meaning our unsub will probably strike again.

• Luke Alvez : All right, look, there are five cell phones here and there's six members of the club.

  David Rossi : Garcia, what have you got?

  Emily Prentiss : These kids would never voluntarily leave their phones.

  Luke Alvez : Whoever's still got their phone, that's our unsub.

  Emily Prentiss : If his friends turned on him, the unsub would experience that as a huge betrayal. He's been killing for them and he's just discovered they're not grateful to him for it.

  David Rossi : [hanging up his phone]  Okay. The kid whose phone isn't here is Kyle Ecklund. He's our unsub. But there's no signal.

  Emily Prentiss : What do we know about him?

  David Rossi : Bare bones biographical details. He's an only child. Mom left him as a toddler. His dad's an alcoholic.

  Luke Alvez : That explains why he's mature.

  Emily Prentiss : Without a reliable caretaker, he was parentified at an early age.

  David Rossi : And now he's switched the focus of his rage from bullies to his own peer group. The family he's seeking to annihilate has expanded.

  Luke Alvez : Yeah, but if we wanted to kill them, why wouldn't he do it here? Why move them?

  Emily Prentiss : He's making a statement.

• Penelope Garcia : Kyle Ecklund has been bullied for a lot of years by a lot of kids. I mean a lot of kids.

  Emily Prentiss : He unleashed on Austin Settergren. What did Austin do to him?

  Penelope Garcia : Let's see... Oh, yes, yes, yes. Okay, so Austin was the ringleader of a particularly horrifying incident that happened a few years back.

  Luke Alvez : We need to know where it happened.

  Penelope Garcia : It happened right there at the basketball courts at school.

  Luke Alvez : This place is a maze.

  David Rossi : Garcia, can you guide us?

  Penelope Garcia : Absolutely.

• Penelope Garcia : The Bergstrom family was killed in their home in Winona, Minnesota last night. Mother, father, and little boy, all shot execution style.

  Jennifer Jareau : Any suspects?

  Penelope Garcia : Therein lies the mystery. The Bergstrom family was as low-risk as they come.

  Dr. Spencer Reid : What about murder-suicide?

  Emily Prentiss : That was ruled out. There was no murder weapon found at the scene, and both Bridget and Scott Bergstrom were shot in their bed.

  David Rossi : But there was a survivor. A teenage daughter.

  Penelope Garcia : Yeah, seventeen year old Amanda. She was out past her curfew at the moment of the murders.

  Jennifer Jareau : And she's the one that found the bodies.

  Dr. Spencer Reid : It almost seems like a hitman scenario.

  Luke Alvez : Maybe a mafia retaliation kill? But that doesn't seem likely in Winona, Minnesota.

  Emily Prentiss : But it does seem like a revenge killing.

  David Rossi : If the unsub expected to wipe out the entire family, he screwed up big time leaving Amanda alive.

  Dr. Spencer Reid : Unless she had something to do with it.

  Penelope Garcia : That's a question mark, but according to the M.E.'s preliminary report, she can't be the shooter based on alibi and time of deaths.

  David Rossi : On the surface, they were a well-liked family living a low-risk lifestyle.

  Dr. Spencer Reid : The daughter, Amanda. Where is she?

  Penelope Garcia : Protective custody, in case the unsub sees her as unfinished business.

  David Rossi : We good?

  Luke Alvez : Mm-hmm.

  David Rossi : We fly.

• David Rossi : Bridget and Scott Bergstrom grew up in Winona and have deep ties to the community.

  Jennifer Jareau : Scott was a local distributor of farm equipment, Bridget cut hair at a salon in the mall.

  Emily Prentiss : And yet they were murdered by a family annihilator.

  Penelope Garcia : Sad, but true. The Bergstrom family had their share of dirty laundry. Though who of us does not?

  Dr. Spencer Reid : Scott developed a Vicodin habit a few years back after a skiing accident.

  Emily Prentiss : So he could have been in over his head with his dealer.

  Jennifer Jareau : So, Bridget was having an affair?

  Penelope Garcia : Yeah. I looked at their financials. She's got a credit card secret just in her name, with charges to a motel just outside of town and nothing else.

  David Rossi : She might have cut things off, causing him to go off the deep end. Can you get us a name?

  Penelope Garcia : Yeah, I'm already into it. You'll have lover boy's name ASAP.

  Dr. Spencer Reid : What about Amanda, the sole survivor? Any motive there?

  Penelope Garcia : Deep sigh. I hate that you're asking that. And deep sigh again, I am bound by duty to report the facts. There's a modest insurance policy; seventeen year old Amanda is the beneficiary.

  Emily Prentiss : $100,000.

  Luke Alvez : That would seem like all the money in the world to a teenager.

  David Rossi : People have been killed for a lot less. That's an unlikely motive for the daughter, but we can't rule her out.

  Dr. Spencer Reid : Whatever set this unsub off, he made the whole family pay for it.

• Emily Prentiss : [at the crime scene]  Unsub entered on the second floor through the cut screen.

  Jennifer Jareau : He had to be physically fit.

  Emily Prentiss : He knew the house well enough to know this was the room to enter.

  Dr. Spencer Reid : He went straight to the parents' room. He wanted to remove the greatest threat first.

  Emily Prentiss : Based on the bullet trajectory, he was standing here at the foot of the bed when he fired. He wanted to stare at them both before firing.

  Jennifer Jareau : And that woke Bridget up. She was attempting to flee when the unsub shot her.

  Dr. Spencer Reid : Did he enjoy watching her terror and panic, or was it inexperience on his part? Bridget's scream is probably what woke Kevin.

  Jennifer Jareau : So the unsub heads down the hallway, where Kevin is coming out of his bedroom.

  Kevin Bergstrom : [flashback]  Mom? Dad?

  Jennifer Jareau : And he runs into the unsub.

• Jennifer Jareau : So it seems this unsub knew who lived here and where each person slept, implying a personal connection with the victims.

  Dr. Spencer Reid : In spite of the home invasion, there's no sign of burglary, so he's mission-oriented.

  Emily Prentiss : He's highly organized and sophisticated.

  Dr. Spencer Reid : The big question is Amanda. Did he think she was home or did he deliberately strike while she was out?

  Jennifer Jareau : We need to talk to her.

• David Rossi : We believe the unsub is a variation of what we know as a family annihilator.

  Emily Prentiss : The garden variety family annihilator is usually a narcissistic male patriarch experiencing psychological stress. This causes him to become homicidal and then suicidal.

  Dr. Spencer Reid : His narcissism often manifests as rage directed at a specific family member, prompting him to murder the entire family as an act of punishment and revenge. He then blames the object of his rage for his violent outburst.

  Luke Alvez : Once the entire family is dead, the patriarch typically commits or attempts to commit suicide.

  Jennifer Jareau : But this unsub is murdering families that are not his own.

  Dr. Spencer Reid : There's a distinct punishment component to the annihilation that's driving this unsub.

  David Rossi : He's more organized than the typical family annihilator, with greater impulse control and a high level of sophistication.

  Emily Prentiss : His sophistication is apparent in the fact that the object of his rage is deliberately spared rather than murdered.

  Jennifer Jareau : This allows the unsub the satisfaction of inflicting ongoing psychological pain on the object of his rage.

  David Rossi : We're looking for a male in his late twenties, early thirties. He's mature and highly intelligent.

  Luke Alvez : Amanda Bergstrom and Matthew Doherty may be surrogates for individuals who wronged the unsub when he himself was an adolescent.

  Emily Prentiss : Amanda and Matt both attend Pillsbury High School, and we have not identified any other connection between them or their families.

  David Rossi : Pay close attention to the faculty and administrators of the high school.

  Sheriff Wilson : A lot of the parents are wondering if we should shut down the high school.

  David Rossi : The school itself has not been a scene of violence. Closing it would not deter this unsub.

  Luke Alvez : We need you to beef up patrols and warn the public of the ongoing danger.

  David Rossi : And we ask you to encourage the entire Pillsbury High School community to report any suspicious individuals they may encounter.