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A personal tragedy can affect someone in unforeseen ways.

The story opened with expectant parents Mike and Stephanie Rose (guest stars Josh Segarra and Rose Hemingway) taking an evening stroll and discussing possible names for their child. Suddenly, a gang of youths came rushing up behind them and one punched Stephanie in the face, felling her. A panicked Mike cradled her and screamed for help.

Frank (Selleck) already had concerns about the so-called "knockout game" being practiced randomly throughout the city's boroughs. As he struggled to determine factors linking the attacks, he ordered the NYPD to reach out to informants for any potentially useful information.

At a hospital, Danny and Maria (Marisa Ramirez) tried to get information from a distraught Mike. He was too shaken to be of much assistance, then was shattered when a doctor told him Stephanie had lost the baby.

Still with nothing to go on the next day, the detectives visited an informant known as Third Person Thorpe (guest star Sharrieff Pugh). Indeed referring to himself in the third person, he told Danny, "Thorpe's in the dark on this one, man" -- until his lady friend was threatened with arrest for drugs Maria found. Suddenly, Thorpe came up with a name for them: his cousin, Willie Hayward (guest star Julito McCullum), cited as "the dummy running the knockout game around here."

Finding Willie at a bar, Danny and Maria chased him when he tried to bolt out the back, then used special persuasion to get details from him ... tossing him in their car trunk and driving him around until he agreed to talk.

After asking Garrett (Gregory Jbara) to appeal to the New York press to stop giving the knockout game attention, Frank wasn't happy to find on his desk a letter recommending the promotion of Officer Timothy Doherty (guest star John Behlmann) -- which he already had rejected. Henry (Len Cariou) had enlisted Garrett to put it in front of Frank again, so it was time for a father-son chat at home.

Henry was a "drinking buddy" of Doherty's father, and the two of them had conspired to help secure the promotion, something Frank wanted no part of. "I don't work that way," Frank maintained, saying he didn't approve of earlier regimes that "valued greased palms over an honest rise up."

Nonplussed, Henry asked Frank whether holding someone back professionally because of the same "hook" -- or personal connection -- for which someone might be promoted "isn't just as bad."

Erin (Bridget Moynahan) frantically ran late as her day began, the cause being Jack (guest star Peter Hermann), her ex-husband who secretly had spent the night while their daughter Nicky (Sami Gayle) was away. Erin was concerned Nicky would come home and find Jack there, but he wasn't remotely as worried, pulling Erin into a shower he was in no rush to finish.

Read the original post:

'Blue Bloods': Tragedy from a 'Knockout Game'