Sara Sidle

Sara Sidle is a fictional person in the tv series CSI.

STATS

     Date of Birth: September 16, 1971
     Place of Birth: Tamales Bay, CA
     Height: 5'8" 
     Weight: 107 lbs. 
     Eyes: Brown
     Hair: Brown, straight, shoulder length 

PROFESSIONAL

Sara is a CSI Level III at the LVPD Criminalistics Bureau. Her forensics specialty is materials and element analysis.

Gil Grissom met Sara at one of his entomology lectures, where she asked him for advice and he took interest in her curious nature. He suggested they keep in touch. He later called her in from San Francisco to help with the Holly Gribbs case- an on-duty homicide of a rookie CSI. After the case was solved, the newly appointed supervisor Grissom invited Sara to stay on as a permanent member of the Vegas night shift. He trusted her, and being new to the team, he had her investigate allegations against Warrick Brown.

Sara loves her work, and is as obsessed if not more so than Grissom when it comes to the case. She is passionate about her cases and often lets her emotions get ahead of her, especially in cases that involve violence against women. This can be both a benefit and a difficulty when working a case. Her passion moves her to go beyond the call of duty (she spent hours searching through missing persons reports to identify a Jane Doe) but can also make her lose focus on what her job truly is. She has a problem with authority, and is almost fired in Season 5 when she backtalks to Catherine Willows and Ecklie. Her work is her life, and she has no outside interests or hobbies.

On her evaluation, Grissom gave her an outstanding remark, but said she needed to improve her ability to prioritize.

EDUCATION

Sara has her B.Sc. in Theoretical Physics from Harvard, and a M.Sc. from UC Berkeley.

In high school, she preferred to befriend teachers over students and she often ate alone in the library. Her physics teach inspired her interest in science. She graduated as valedictorian at age sixteen, having aced her exams.

She was accepted early admissions to Harvard with a large scholarship. She found it to be a freeing experience because she felt she was finally among her equals. She later transferred to Berkeley. She graduated at the top of her class with a B.Sc. in Theoretical Physics and decided to pursue an advanced degree. While in graduate school, she started a Work-study position at the San Francisco Coroner’s office. She chose to stay on and worked her way up to a CSI Level 2. In order to keep up with new developments, she audited lectures and seminars with local universities. This is what led her to meet Grissom.

PERSONAL LIFE AND PERSONALITY

Sara is unmarried. In Season 3 she had a boyfriend, Hank, who was an EMT. He was involved in several of her cases. Through the whole series, she and Grissom have had some sort of attraction between the two of them. Also, one of the lab techs, Dave Phillips has a crush on her but she keeps him at arm’s length.

Sara’s personality is that of a loner. Her hobbies are all work related (listening to her police scanner and reading forensic journals). She prefers to work with corpses over live people and isn’t sure what to do with children (as is evident in her interactions with Brenda Collins, a child who survived a family massacre). She does not trust other people, especially men.

Sara is very forthright in her attitude, and that can rub people the wrong way. She butted heads with Catherine when they first met and had to work together on the Holly Gribbs case, but as they got to know each other, they've since become good friends.

Compassionate towards others, especially women who have been assaulted or abused, Sara puts her whole self into every case. When a rapist was on the loose, selecting victims much like herself, she offered herself as bait. She has a fiery temper that flares up when she feels justice isn’t being served to those women. She also has a soft spot for animals- after seeing Grissom’s pig experiment she became Vegetarian, and she puts in additional time on a case involving a slaughtered Gorilla.

She's an enigma... all softness and teary-eyed at times, and tough as nails at others. Perhaps this stems from her dilemma over who she really is and how she wants to be perceived.

She has changed over time. She decides to pursue outside interests at Grissom’s nagging after a case where the murdered woman looked just like her (“Butterfly Effect”), which resulted in her having a relationship with Hank. However, when Hank betrays her (“Crash and Burn”) and she finds out he has another girlfriend (who was injured in one of her cases) she doesn’t give him a second chance. A close call in a lab explosion motivates her to ask Grissom out when she realizes that she could have been killed.

In recent seasons, Sara seems to be on a downward spiral. Cases get more difficult for her emotionally and at the end of Season 4 she’s caught DUI and Grissom is called in. While not charged, she’s humiliated in front of her supervisor. In season 5 she loses her temper at a suspect, and then at Catherine and Ecklie. When there is talk of her being dismissed, Grissom steps in and goes to Sara to find the real reasons for her behaviour. She admits she has a problem with authority, chooses males who are emotionally unavailable and has a self destructive streak. His further probing reveals her traumatic past.

PAST

Sara was born September 16, 1971 on Tamales Bay, an hour and a half outside of San Francisco. She was an only child. Her parents were ex-hippies who ran a B&B, where she preferred to associate with the adults over the children. Her intellect, energy and curiosity were much greater than that of a typical child. She was a perfectionist. It seemed that the roles of parent and child were reversed. They told her to relax and take it easy, and she in turn responded by creating business models for their B&B so they could take it public and franchise it. In Season 5 it is revealed that Sara’s mother murdered her father, and she was taken into foster care. She remembers being the child whose father was murdered. She can’t remember the name of her first foster mother, but remembers being unable to let go of her hand. She did come to refer to her foster mother as mom though, as is evident when she mentions that “growing up, I found a bag of weed under my brother’s bed. I thought it was dirt, so I took it to my mom, who grounded him for a year.”

MISCELLANEOUS

-Has diastema.

-Used to smoke but now use Nicorette. ("Cool Change")

-She likes dead body cases, especially those with just bones ("what a rush"), and loves working with Grissom's Red Creeper fingerprint powder.

-Although she quit smoking, she still carries a cigarette lighter. ("Face Lift")

-She wants to be cremated, not buried. ("Friends and Lovers")

-Sara would rather be at work than just about anywhere else. In her free time she listens to the police scanner, reads forensic journals and orders out.

-Hates bees. ("Sex, Lies and Larvae")

-"In high school, I was a science nerd."

-She liked beef jerky, but then after Grissom's postmortem maggot experiment with a pig, became vegetarian. ("Face Lift")

-She is open to theories such as Spontaneous Human Combustion. ("Face Lift")

-Occasionally likes to sing while she works. ("Too Tough to Die")

-She is a member of the Mile High Club, meaning she had sex in an airplane at an altitude of over one mile. It was on Delta flight #1109, Boston to Miami, in March of '93 with Ken Fuller (hazel eyes, organic chem lab major) and she told Grissom that the experience was overrated... in every aspect.

-Unlike the passenger of that Las Vegas Air flight, she could never take another life. ("Unfriendly Skies")

-Drives a black Chevrolet Tahoe, license 019 ATO.

-Sara once worked three weeks straight without a day off. ("Table Stakes")

-Puts sugar in her coffee. ("Too Tough to Die")

-Likes Chilean Sea Bass. ("Too Tough to Die")

-Generally she wears slacks and tops, but is a little more casual than Catherine.

-Has a small tatoo on the top of her foot (where the shin meets the foot)

-She's trained in weaponless defense

Sources

CSI Handbook (no URL) Hours of watching CSI