Tonight on NBC Law & Order SVU returns with an all-new Thursday, May 15, 2025 episode and we have your Law & Order SVU recap below.
In tonight’s Law & Order SVU season 26 episode 22 “Post-Rage,” as per the NBC synopsis, “Benson investigates a string of sexual assaults targeting local female psychiatrists. The squad celebrates a promotion.”
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In tonight’s Law & Order SVU episode, Detective Velasco was working late one night. He was catching up on paperwork. His captain pretended to suddenly notice he was still there and she told him that he needed a break. She offered to buy him a drink. It was all a ruse to get Velasco to the bar because he was being promoted.
He was now a Detective Second Grade. The whole squad showed up to celebrate with him. They weren’t paying so they didn’t mind drinking to their hearts’ content. Not that his friends showed up just for that. They all liked Velasco too. He was a great cop.
Something they didn’t see at first because they thought he was a spy. He was a spy. He also had secrets and trauma that Benson helped him to work through. Velasco has since proven to be a valuable member to SVU. He also didn’t come into work the next morning with a hangover.
They caught a case. There was a psychiatrist that was assaulted in her own home. Her name is Dr. Gretchen Stewart. She heard him breaking in. She tried to get her gun only her attacker surprised her. He attacked her. He even went for right eye for some reason.
He tore her retina. Though that wasn’t the only odd thing. The attacker also covered up the victim afterwards. Curry thought it might be a ritual and Benson, who was more experienced, suggested something different. She thought that covering up the victim was remorse. The doctor had a book full of notes she kept on patients.
There were several pages ripped out. Her assistant looked through the book. She said the patient must have ripped out pages from around the holidays. And she couldn’t say anything more because it was privileged information.
The assistant did mention that Gretchen went to dinner with a colleague earlier that night. She went to dinner with Dr. Gary Schwartz. He was another psychiatrist. He wanted them to be more and Gretchen wasn’t ready for such a relationship. She lost her husband a few years ago. The wound was still fresh.
When she later woke up at the hospital, she asked for her husband. She was still groggy at the time and she wanted to be comforted. The cops thankfully had a suspect by then. Schwartz told them that Gretchen mentioned a problematic patient named Anthony Fiero.
Fiero was arrested twice for domestic violence against his wife. It didn’t go anywhere because the wife refused to testify against him. The cops believed she instead suggested couple’s counseling thinking that would fix their problems. Only Gretchen told Schwartz that she was doing her best to convince the wife to leave Fiero. She’s been trying since they became her patients over the winter holidays. The same time as the pages were ripped out of her notes. The cops later asked Gretchen about him when she situated herself. And she told them that she tried to use her gun.
The same gun that wasn’t found at the scene. She got it three months ago. The fact it wasn’t at the scene meant the attacker took it with him and Gretchen was worried about what he might do with it. She knew Fiero. She found him particularly nasty. The cops went looking for him. They found him coming out of a bodega. They tried to detain him and he ran. He also fired at them. He was soon cornered and that’s when he threw himself off an overpass. He died instantly when he hit a car on the ground.
Benson thought the case had resolved itself. Carisi said they couldn’t close this one yet. The gun that Fiero used wasn’t Gretchen’s gun. His wife did leave him. She got a restraining order against him. It simply wasn’t because of his temper. It was his paranoia that got her to leave.
He got addicted to ketamine and it made him paranoid to the point that he thought his wife was cheating on him. He had her followed her. He questioned her. He checked her underwear once to see if she had been with someone else. She never cheated on him and he refused to believe her. It’s why she wanted therapy.
Carisi still didn’t feel the case was over. His instincts proved to be right when a second psychiatrist was found murdered. Dr. Wright was sexually assaulted, had both eyes gouged out, was moved to a couch before her killer covered her up with a blanket. He was either escalating or Gretchen got lucky.
Both women used the same website for online counseling. It was called American Psychiatric Wellness. They have a shared patient named Keith Sparks. Sparks has been given Gretchen the runaround lately. She kept trying to contact him. And he didn’t answer.
There was also no one named Keith Sparks in the city. Wright kept more notes than Gretchen. She left them at home and was murdered at work. Thus her widow still had her notes. He handed them over to the police. They went looking for anyone with a propensity for violence.
They found one guy that believed he assassinated a former president and that there was a deep state that covered it up. He wasn’t their killer. He hasn’t actually done any of the crimes he claimed to have done. Benson also ordered Curry to look into other cases with the same MO. She said that’s the killer’s real signature.
Curry later found another murder with the same MO in Connecticut. It was another female psychiatrist. Dr. Burgess was sexually assaulted and had her eyes gouged out.
She too was killed. She was covered in a blanket what Benson assumed the adrenaline wore off. It’s what she thought happened with the other victims as well. Only Burgess was killed before Gretchen was attacked. It led to everyone wondering why wasn’t she killed too? Gretchen’s eye was even able to get reattached through surgery.
The now proven killer didn’t want to blind her. Not as much as he wanted to blind the others. Burgess wasn’t married. She was a little older. She has an adult son that has been looking for answers for years and he was happy to help the police. Curry stayed longer in Connecticut with Finn hoping to find out who was responsible.
Back in the NYC, they thought they had a credible suspect with the mysterious Keith Sparks. It wasn’t his real name after all. His real name is Ted Schramm. Gretchen believed he was the man known as Keith Sparks.
He was a mechanic. He also tried to run when the cops identified themselves. Schramm willingly jumped off the roof of the building onto the fire escape next door. He did everything to get away and was still ultimately caught by police. He was arrested. He was questioned. Schramm eventually admitted that he has been seeing several therapist sporadically.
He was institutionalized a few times because of the many therapists that recommended it. He calls therapy mental manipulation. He wanted to be free of his pain and he felt the therapists never helped him. They just talked.
Schramm took responsibility for the assaults/murders. He was formally charged and that seemed to be it. Carisi was going to throw the book at him in court because these crimes were premeditated. Maybe Gretchen not wanting to give up on Schramm was why he didn’t kill her.
And Velasco received his promotion at an amazing ceremony that honored their work.
THE END!
