Gender:Female

CSI Level:Three

Date of Birth:09/16/71

Height:---

Education: B.S. in Theoretical Physics
Weight: ---

Special Skills:Materials and Element analysis

Hair Colour:Brunette

Known Relitives: Laura Sidle (mother); unnamed father (deceased), unnamed brother (howevever there is no mention of him on many online profiles or even in the official CSI books: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation Companion, Written by: Mike Flaherty with case files by: Corinne Marrinan  & Ultimate CSI:Crime Scene Investiagtion Written By: Corinne Marrinan and Steve Parker)

According to her official CBS biography, the character was born in Tamales Bay, an hour and a half outside of San Francisco. Her parents were ex-hippies who ran a bed and breakfast, where Sara preferred to associate more with the adults than with other children. Her intellect, energy and curiosity were much greater than that of a typical child. Her parents told her to relax and take it easy, and she in turn responded by creating business models for their bed and breakfast so they could take it public and franchise it.

In the season four episode "After The Show", Sara recalled that her father told her she was both "smart" and "pretty" when she was growing up. However, in season five of the series, it was revealed that Sara’s mother (Laura Sidle) killed her father in 1984, and Sara was subsequently taken into foster care. Laura Sidle apparently stabbed Sara's alcoholic father, who had frequently battered her, in self-defense.^[1] After the incident, Sara was taken into foster care. At this stage, she once found a bag of weed under her "brother's" bed and ratted him out to their foster parents. In the fifth season episode "No Humans Involved", Sara told a young girl in a foster home that she was in the system "for a while" and is familiar with the feelings of helplessness foster children feel. She remembers being the child whose father was murdered by her mother. In another fifth season episode, "Nesting Dolls", she said she cannot remember the name of the social worker who took her away from the murder scene, but did recall being unable to let go of the woman's hand. This memory is a parallel to Sara's own actions in the first season episode Blood Drops, when she developed a bond with Brenda Collins, a survivor of a family murder who refused to let go of Sara's hand.

Education

In high school, according to the character's official CBS biography, Sara preferred to befriend teachers over students and she often ate alone in the library. Her physics teacher inspired her interest in science. She graduated as valedictorian at age sixteen, having aced her exams.

She was accepted among the early admissions of Harvard University with a large scholarship. She found it to be a freeing experience because she felt she was finally among her equals. She graduated at the top of her class with a Bachelor of Science in Theoretical Physics from Harvard.

Sara decided to pursue an advanced degree from University of California, Berkeley. She graduated with a Master's 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 was what led her to meet Gil Grissom.

Professional

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 Las Vegas, Nevada night shift. He trusted her, and because she was new to the team, he had her investigate allegations against Warrick Brown.

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

Sara loves her work, and is as obsessed if not more so than Grissom when it comes to their cases. 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 was almost fired in the season five episode "Nesting Dolls" when she argued with Catherine Willows and Conrad Ecklie.

In early seasons, her work appeared to be her life, and she had no outside interests or hobbies. On one performance evaluation, Grissom gave her an outstanding rating, but said she needed to improve her ability to prioritize (the last part, however, is said at least partly in jest).

Romantic relationships

Sara's romantic relationships have been largely unsuccessful. In a seventh season episode, "Fallen Idols" she mentioned a college boyfriend who cheated on her. In a first season episode, ("Unfriendly Skies"), she recalled having sex in an airplane in 1993 with college boyfriend Ken Fuller, making her a member of the "Mile High Club", although she thought the experience was "overrated...in every aspect". It isn't clear whether Fuller was also the boyfriend who cheated on her, but she said their relationship was unsatisfactory. In the third season she had a boyfriend, Hank Pettigrew, who was an emergency medical technician. He was involved in several of her cases. Later in the season, Sara broke up with Hank after finding out that he was dating someone else in the episode "Crash and Burn". Coroner David Phillips and laboratory technician Greg Sanders had crushes on her, but she has viewed them as friends.

Throughout the series, she and Gil Grissom have appeared to be romantically attracted to one another. In the sixth season finale, "Way To Go", it was revealed that they are in a relationship, which stirred up great debate among fans. The final scene of the episode showed Grissom reclining on a bed, talking about how he would prefer to die. He said he would rather die of cancer so he would have time to say goodbye to his loved ones. Sara came out of the bathroom in a bathrobe, and said, "I'm not ready to say goodbye." In a May 25, 2006 interview with the Chicago Tribune, the show's executive producer Carol Mendelsohn indicated that the relationship between Grissom and Sara is "not so new" and they have been a couple for some time. Producers have not specified when their relationship began, but Grissom's speech at the end of the fourth season episode "Butterflied", and dialogue in the fifth season episode "Nesting Dolls", suggest it is unlikely they were intimate before the end of the fifth season.

In seventh season episodes, it appeared that Grissom and Sara continued to be involved, but were trying to keep their relationship secret from their co-workers at the lab. However, in the seventh season premiere episode "Built to Kill, Part 1" co-worker Warrick Brown paid some note when Grissom delivered a veggie burger to Sara, who was working late on a case, but neglected to bring him dinner as well. In the second episode of the seventh season "Built to Kill, Part 2", Conrad Ecklie commented that "of course" Sara would agree with Grissom instead of him, which made Sara and Grissom worry for a moment that he might have caught on to the relationship.

They were also still learning about one another. In "Double-Cross," another seventh season episode, Sara discussed religious beliefs with Grissom when they investigated a murder in a Roman Catholic church. She is agnostic, while Grissom is a lapsed Catholic who still believes in God. Sara expressed the opinion that God was invented so people would have someone to blame for their mistakes; when she asked if she had offended him with her opinions, Grissom replied, "No, dear." In another seventh season episode, "Meet Market" Grissom took a sabbatical and, while gone, wrote Sara a letter acknowledging his feelings for her and telling her he had missed her. Sara found and read Grissom's letter, which quoted from William Shakespeare's Sonnet No. 47, in the seventh season episode "Leapin' Lizards." Grissom had concealed the letter inside a book of Shakespeare's works that he left out on his bedside table. In the seventh season episode "The Good, the Bad, and the Dominatrix" Sara was disconcerted by Grissom's determination to help Lady Heather.

In an earlier seventh season episode, "Fallen Idols" he told her that he trusts her "intimately." In the seventh season episode "Ending Happy", while investigating a murder at a brothel, Sara questioned Grissom about whether he had ever been to such an establishment. Grissom denied it, going on to state that he finds paying for sex pointless, as he finds that physical intimacy without love makes one sad. When Sara commented that she doesn't think she makes him sad, Grissom replied that no, she makes him happy. While at times Grissom seems to harbor difficulty in expressing his feelings toward Sara, as he notes in the letter he wrote in "Meet Market", it is in instances such as these that, with subtlety consistent with his nature, Grissom makes his affections clear.

In the season 7 finale "Living Doll", Grissom and Sara's relationship was revealed to the rest of the CSIs following Sara's abduction by The Miniature Killer. As a bystander in a crowd of people at a past crime scene, Natalie, the killer, witnessed Grissom caress Sara's arm as he was taking an equipment bag off her shoulder. During the investigation, Grissom sees Natalie at the scene in the crime scene photos and remembers the public display of affection that Natalie must have seen. He explained to the CSIs that Natalie blames him for the death of her foster father, the only person she ever loved, and that Natalie is now doing the same thing to him. Warrick, Nick, Greg and Catherine were present during this revelation, but only brief, surprised reactions were shown. Grissom later tried to persuade Natalie to tell him what she had done with Sara. Natalie said she had not killed Sara, but did not reveal her whereabouts. The closing scene of the finale showed a car wreck, with a completely concealed person trapped under the wreckage. A woman's hand, presumably Sara's, protruded from under the wreckage, matching the model Natalie delivered to Grissom's office before her capture. The hand twitched and then groped around the ground. The cliffhanger episode will be continued in the premiere episode of the eighth season of CSI.

 Character growth

In the early years of the show, the character was depicted as a loner. Her hobbies were all work related (listening to her police scanner and reading forensic journals); she also confessed in the second season episode "Bully For You" that she was a "science nerd" in high school, but also states in the fifth season episode "Compulsion"that "geeks should be revered". She preferred to work with corpses over live people and was not sure what to do with children. She enjoys working homicide cases; she describes working cases where skeletons are found as a "rush" and in the first season she responds to her assignment to a homicide with "Dead body. Bonus!" Despite this and her capacity to deal with the unpleasantness of her profession, she is unnerved by bees ("Sex, Lies and Larvae"), finds spit nauseating ("Fight Night") and vomited when she attended her first autopsy ("Down the Drain"). Her forthright attitude often rubbed people the wrong way; she butted heads with Catherine Willows when they first met in the first season episode "Cool Change" and they had to work together on the Holly Gribbs case. Their differences still cause occasional friction, but they've become good friends.

Perhaps because of her traumatic childhood, the character has demonstrated compassion and empathy for victims of domestic violence and fury against their abusers.^[2] When a rapist was on the loose, selecting victims much like herself, she offered herself as bait in the episode "Strip Strangler", claiming that she was safe because she was trained in weaponless defence. Her temper flared up when she felt justice was not being served to those women. She also has a soft spot for animals. After seeing Grissom conduct an experiment using a pig, she became a vegetarian in the CSI episode Burden of Proof, and she put in additional time on a case involving a slaughtered gorilla in the episode "Evaluation Day".

The character has also changed over time. She decided to pursue outside interests after identifying too closely with a victim who ordered from catalogues and ate take-out (“You've Got Male”) which resulted in her having a relationship with Hank Pettigrew, an Emergency Medical Technician. However, when Hank betrayed her (“Crash and Burn”) and she found out he had another girlfriend (who was injured in one of her cases) she refused to give him a second chance. A close call in a lab explosion in the third season episode, "Play With Fire", motivated her to ask Grissom out when she realized that she could have been killed, though Grissom turned her down.

In the fourth and fifth seasons, the character seemed to be on a downward spiral as her memories of her childhood surfaced. Cases became more difficult for her emotionally and at the end of the fourth season she was caught driving under the influence of alcohol and Grissom was called in. While she was not charged, she was humiliated in front of her supervisor. In a fifth season episode, ("Nesting Dolls"), she lost her temper with a suspect, and then with Catherine and Ecklie. When there was talk of her being dismissed, Grissom stepped in and went to Sara to find the real reasons for her behavior. She admitted she had a problem with authority, chose emotionally unavailable men like Grissom and had a self destructive streak. Grissom's further probing revealed that her mother killed her father. Sara said she grew up believing that violent behavior and subsequent trips to the emergency room to have injuries treated was normal and didn't find out otherwise until she was taken into foster care. She worried that she might have inherited a tendency to violent behavior and asked Grissom if he thought there was a "murder gene." Grissom told her he didn't think violent behavior is inherited. After her father's murder, Sara said she became "the girl whose father was stabbed to death by her mother."

In a later fifth season episode, "Committed", Sara told Grissom that her mother was admitted to a mental hospital for evaluation after she killed Sara's father. Because of her memories, Sara was disturbed in "Committed" by the atmosphere in the mental hospital where they were investigating a murder of a mental patient. She told Grissom that "crazy people make me feel crazy" but resolved to move beyond her past and refused to let her memories impact her work. In sixth and seventh season episodes, when she was revealed to be in a stable relationship with Grissom, she appeared to be on a more even keel.