As Amanda visits her colleague at his job at Edgemont High", a car pulls up and opens fire at the school. Math teacher Pete Delvecchio is the only casualty, and the blame is put on a student. Mark joins in on the investigation, butting heads with ADA Susan Turner, a woman with her sights set squarely on locking up student Tommy Park, a she is under the impression that the shooting was a retaliation for some African American students shooting up a pool house he and his fellow Korean students frequent.
Mark, however, thinks there is something more at play here, and sets his own sights to finding out just if the shooting is an extracurricular to some deeper crime.
"The ABC's of Murder" displays symptoms of the following tropes:
- Boom, Headshot!: Mr. Delvecchio gets a bullet squarely to his forehead.
- Chekhov's Gun:
- Early in the episode, while Amanda and her friend at the school are swapping gossip about their two jobs, her friend briefly mentions among other tidbits that Principal Morrison often takes gambling trips to Las Vegas. This doesn't become suspicious until much later, when it turns out that Delveccio was in witness protection - and hunted by the Las Vegas mob. In the summation, it surmises that the mob traded Morrison's gambling debts for Delveccio's life.
- While Steve is poking around the school's automotive program, the teacher points out an engine wired up with the wires being stripped. Jesse notices the same style when he sees photos of Tommy's car and figures he's the one who did it.
- Principal Morrison tells a janitor to return the locker master key to him when they are done inspecting lockers. This key is... well, key in figuring out he is the culprit, as he is the only one who could have place the gun, money, and note with instructions to Derek in his locker's top shelf, as it is too high for the note to be simply slipped through.
- For the Evulz:
- The boy who killed Susan's husband says he "just felt like it" when he was asked by the judge at his trial why he did it.
- This is Derek's motivation for pitting the Koreans and African American students against each other, in addition to him being a racist little shit.
- Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: When Ron Swanson testified against his mob associates, he got 5 major convictions out of it. In payback, the gangsters pushed Principal Wallace into murdering him. When he's caught, Wallace testfies about the gangsters who put him up to it, which pulls in almost twice as many people as Ron had.
- It's Personal: Susan is pushing so hard on the idea that the shooting was a part of the student's issues is that her husband was shot by a kid who had no remorse about it.
- Punk in the Trunk: When Susan convinces Tommy and Darnell to lead her to Derek, they get out of the car and pop the trunk, where Derek is Bound and Gagged.
- Politically Incorrect Villain: Derek Moran. it comes with the skinhead territory, complete with Nazi-esque lightning tattoo on his arm.
- More antagonist than villain, but before she comes to her senses Turner reads as a criticism of the War on Drugs-era prejudice and habit of "treating the symptoms" (something she namedrops specifically), cracking down on inner city and disenfranchised youth for the smallest of things and doing damage to them rather than protecting them as the law should. Sloane confronts this about her directly, and she eventually realizes her folly as the episode goes on.
- Red Herring: Don tells Amanda a rumor he heard about having dated a Social Studies teacher named Barbara Sutter and then dumping her. With her being on leave, it seems she could be a suspect for murdering Delvecchio. However, Don later learns that Sutter and Delvecchio only went on two dates and figured they weren't really compatible. That lack of real motive and the fact that that she was in Bimini on vacation take her out of the running.
- Smokescreen Crime: The drive-by at the school was a cover to hide the fact that Delvecchio had been outright murdered.
- Spotting the Thread:
- Mark goes into the classroom where Pete was murdered to see something about the death. he finds that while the bullet is at about the right angle for the shooting, the fact that the bullet went out through the back of his head when a MAC-10 would lose much of its stopping power and aren't horribly accurate even at closer range gives him pause. Sure enough, the bullet holes from the drive-by are embedded in the wall far too high for the angle Pete was shot from, and ballistics proves that the killing bullet was completely different from the others.
- Steve looks into Pete's history and notes that it says he attended Central Illinois State on a football scholarship in 1982. However, CIS dropped football from their courses in 1971. As such,, they have no record of a Peter Delvecchio ever attending.
- Trapped by Gambling Debts: Morrison was pulled into murdering Ron/Pete by his frequent gambling trips to Las Vegas. Loan sharks he was in hock to over his losses were connected to the gangsters Ron had testified against offered to wipe his debts if he wiped out Ron.
- Witness Protection: Pete Delvecchio was formerly Ron Swanson, an investment manager who used to run money for the mob in Las Vegas. When the FBI came knocking, he agreed to testify against his colleagues to avoid going to prison, and was reinvented as Pete Delvecchio.
