Diksha Sundriyal
Netflix’s ‘Eric’ begins with the disappearance of a 9-year-old kid named Edgar Anderson. One morning, he leaves home for school, which is a couple of blocks away. However, he never reaches the school and doesn’t come back home. Within those couple of blocks, someone got to him, and as the days pile on, his case creates a media frenzy that rips apart everything within the Anderson family. NYPD detective Michael Ledroit handles the case and tries his best to find Edgar, but he is also weighed down by a previous case.
Eleven months ago, a teenager named Marlon Rochelle went missing. While Ledroit did his best to find the kid, his case didn’t receive as much attention, and his superiors didn’t seem too concerned with solving the case simply because the kid was Black and was known to have indulged in drugs. Unexpectedly, the details of Edgar’s case lead Ledroit to uncover the truth about what really happened to Marlon.
Marlon Rochelle’s Murder was Covered Up by the Authorities
While Marlon Rochelle’s case was declared to have met a dead end, Ledroit didn’t believe so. His investigation had led him to The Lux, a club run by Alexander Gator, a convicted pedophile who was known to use his establishment for illegal activities. Ledroit wanted to keep investigating the place, especially after he found out that two Vice officers, Kennedy and Nokes, were also connected to him. However, as promising as the lead seemed, he was not officially allowed to follow up. Still, even when the case was put on the back foot by his superiors, Ledroit would regularly visit The Lux, hoping to stumble upon something that could help crack the case.
Ledroit suspects that Marlon had been working at The Lux as a sex worker. It wasn’t difficult to imagine Gator’s past, but the latter tried to convince Ledroit that he did not employ kids at his place. He claimed he was done with all that and didn’t want his business to get embroiled in something illegal. Still, Ledroit is convinced that the answers to Marlon’s mystery lay in the Lux, and eventually, he asks Gator to pull up the CCTV footage of the day Marlon went missing.
Seeing it as the only way to allay Ledroit’s suspicions, Gator went over the footage and realized that the footage on the day of Marlon’s murder was missing from the records. He realizes that TJ has something to do with it, which angers him because, due to his actions, The Lux has been put in jeopardy. He tells TJ to bring the footage, and as it turns out, it holds all the answers. When Ledroit sees the footage, his suspicions are confirmed. The Lux was the place where the murder took place, and Nokes and Kennedy were involved in it. What makes matters even worse is that some much bigger names are also connected to it, and this explains why Ledroit’s superiors were not so keen on having the case solved.
This is what happened that night. Pimped out by TJ, Marlon worked at The Lux. On the night of his murder, he was paid by Richard Costello, whom he gave a blowjob in the back alley of the club. Then Nokes and Kennedy arrived, and they beat young Marlon so much that he could never recover from it. He died on the spot. This was a great problem, not just for the detectives but also for Richard Costello, who immediately called his brother-in-law Bruno di Bari, the owner of Hudson Sanitation. Di Bari called up his people at the plant, who arrived on the scene and took away Marlon’s body under the guise of getting the trash. They took the body to the dump site and threw it with the trash, fully aware that no one would come looking for it there.
Knowing that TJ was the one running Marlon, they told him to do away with the CCTV footage, which was the only witness to their crime. With the footage gone, no one could place Kennedy, Nokes, and Costello at the crime scene; no one would ever find out about Marlon’s body being taken by the trash collectors. Most importantly, no one would even know Marlon was killed there. With a dead body or any proof of murder, his case would remain a missing person case, and with the right people at the NYPD in their pockets, Di Bari and Costello could make the whole thing go away.
They would have gotten away with it had it been any other police officer instead of Ledroit. Any other cop wouldn’t have bothered so much with digging up things that weren’t seemingly there. Any other cop wouldn’t have been haunted by the fact that a young Black kid went missing, and no one seemed to care. It was Ledroit’s continued efforts, fuelled by Marlon’s mother’s relentless love for her son and to find out what happened to him even when she knew in her heart he was dead that eventually brought the truth to light. The footage makes for irrefutable evidence, and the culprits are brought to justice.
Read More: Where is Netflix’s Eric Filmed? Exploring All the Locations
