When you watch a long-running police procedural like “Blue Bloods,” you end up learning that death is always around the corner. These deaths can come from anywhere, whether it’s a minor cameo, a single-episode guest star, a recurring character, or even a series regular. Nothing is off the table when a show is centered around the dedicated lawmen working the streets of one of the world’s biggest cities and confronting its most dangerous criminals.
For “Blue Bloods,” though, these deaths can often be truly tragic, as the series isn’t just focused on a group of any old detectives and beat cops, but a tight-knit family. Led by Frank Reagan (Tom Selleck), the family has members littered throughout the law enforcement community, both in the NYPD and in the city’s courthouse. Between the victims of violent crime that they encounter in their cases and the sudden and unexpected deaths of those close to the family — and sometimes within it — things get downright tragic. These are the saddest deaths in the history of “Blue Bloods,” ranked.
Linda Reagan
We don’t get to see the death of Linda Reagan (Amy Carlson) on-screen, so, like Sonny Malevsky, the sad nature of her demise is more about its aftermath and what it means to the surviving characters. After all, Linda is a member of the Reagan family, even if she isn’t one of the series regulars out on the streets protecting the city from its worst criminals. But she’s married to one who is: Danny Reagan (Donnie Wahlberg). Her death may hit him harder than any other death in the series, even his brother Joe’s.
In the wake of her accidental death in a helicopter crash, Danny is shaken with grief and his home life is left in ruins. He becomes a single father overnight and struggles to keep it together, even considering leaving the force altogether. Things get even more intense when it’s discovered that Linda’s death may not have been an accident at all, and was likely orchestrated by a drug cartel led by Jose Rojas (Danny Trejo).
The saddest part of Linda’s demise may be that we don’t get to see it. Feeling the weight of her loss through others is utterly gut-wrenching.
Officer Michelle Martin
Like Anna in “Little Fish,” Officer Michelle Martin (Maggie Steele) only gets one scene in Season 1’s “Officer Down.” But when audiences first meet her, she’s bright, cheery, and just going about her daily beat, casually talking on her cell phone. When she comes across a disturbance, Officer Martin realizes she’s stumbled upon a robbery in progress, and rushes in to stop the thieves who’ve taken hostages inside a diamond exchange. Face to face with an armed gunman, Martin finds herself on the wrong end of the barrel of a crook’s gun, and is shot in cold blood. She dies alone on the side of the street.
As the gunman rushes off with a huge haul of jewels in the back of the getaway truck, the camera cuts to Martin’s lifeless body on the pavement. It’s revealed that she’s pronounced dead on the way to the hospital. But Martin’s death is more than just an officer dying in the line of duty, which would be sad enough on its own. The scene is crushing because of what we hear just prior. In that moment, Officer Martin talks on the phone with her husband and is just about to celebrate their wedding anniversary. We also discover that the married couple has a six-year-old son at home, who will now have to live without his mother.
Emily Copeland
Season 7’s “Love Lost” opens with a beautiful young woman named Emily Copeland (Stephanie Patent) lying soundly in her bed, apparently asleep. But we quickly realize she is not in a peaceful slumber — she has suffered a strangulation death in her home, and there are no signs of a break-in despite an open window. Suspicion immediately shifts to Emily’s husband Brian (Adam Wade McLaughlin), who claims he’d come home to find her dead and called it in himself. The fact that he recently took out a life insurance policy makes him look even more guilty.
Eschewing the standard “wrongfully accused” story of many police procedurals, Brian soon confesses that he killed his own wife, but that’s not quite the end of this sad story. The real shocker is the revelation that Emily was recently diagnosed with late-stage cancer, and didn’t want to live out her remaining days in pain and hardship. Instead, she asked her husband to help her end her own life, and no matter how much he didn’t want to go through with it, he felt duty-bound to do as his wife asked.
This death isn’t just sad because of the loss of a promising young woman’s life — it’s downright tragic because her well-intentioned, loving husband finds himself facing a life sentence for murder.
Joe Reagan
It may seem odd to pick a death that happens before the series starts as one of the saddest in “Blue Bloods” history, but this is no ordinary loss. The death of Joseph Reagan is the catalyst for the series to begin, and when we pick up the action in the premiere episode, it hasn’t been all that long since the tragic event occurred. Joseph’s death casts a pall over the entire first season — and to some extent the entirety of the show’s run — as the family struggles to deal with the demise of a fellow NYPD officer, a son, a brother, and — as we later learn — a father.
Early on, the entire Reagan clan grieves the loss, and is motivated to find his killer and do justice to his memory. In Season 10, we meet a woman who claims to be the mother of Joseph’s child, who has been named after his father. This is a double revelation: There’s another member of the family — little Joe Reagan is the spitting image of their lost kin — and, as it turns out, a young officer followed in his father’s footsteps. Despite only ever seeing a photograph of Joseph Reagan in the series’ pilot, the audience knows his death is one of the saddest the family has ever had to deal with.
Sarah Peterson
The only thing preventing our next entry from topping our list is that there’s another death more closely related to a main cast member . Otherwise, the loss of Sarah Peterson in Season 9’s “Two-Faced” would take the highest spot, due to its jaw-dropping sorrow. The episode centers around the death of a young woman named Sarah, who seems to have been the victim of her own father, Dr. David Peterson (Armand Schultz), who was apparently using her as a guinea pig for his radical, risky, and experimental new medicine.
While the loss of a young woman at the hands of her own father would be heart-aching enough, the story’s next destination compounds the misery. Dr. Peterson is responsible for her death, but he wasn’t misguided at all: He was attempting to cure her of a debilitating disease with methods no other doctor would dare attempt. Despite all his insistence that he had no other choice — his daughter was going to die in agony anyway — he now faces the prospect of a prison sentence for murder. To top it all off, the good doctor and grieving father isn’t looking to fight the system; at one point he seems to accept that he may actually have to see time behind bars.