“After eight years playing Sara Sidle, Jorja Fox is bitting farewell to” CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. “In an exclusive interview with” The Official CSI Magazine, “the actress chats about her final episodes…”

November 8, 2007 proved a sad day for “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” fans when Sara Sidle left the Las Vegas Crime Lab for the last time. After escaping death at the nads of minature kill Natalie Kimble in the season eight opener “Dead Doll,” the gutsy CSI had struggled to settle back into her job, with even a marriage proposal from Grissom doing little to raise her spirits. Following an explosive row with Greg Sanders in the crime department’s locker room, the final straw came for Sara when she was ordered to reopen a case that she and Nick had bungled a few years back, involving a suspected 12-year-old murderess (“The Unusual Suspect”). Weary of the strsses a job in Sin City can bring, Sara decides to bid farewell to Las Vegas for good, much to the dismay of her fellow CSIs.

For actress Jorja Fox, who has played Sara Sidle since the second episode of the show’s first season, it was important that her character left in this manner, as opposed to dying in the season seven finale, as was initially proposed. In an exclusive interview with “The Official CSI Magazine”, the 39-year-old actress declared: “I did not want Sara to die. I did not want that to be the way she went out. I have played characters that have died before so I am not afraid of that. It can actually make really good drama and it certainly happens in real life where people we know and love die. But I just didn’t want that to be the end for Sara. In addition to that, I didn’t want it to be under those circumstances. God forbit she was going to die, I didn’t want it to be at the hands of some skinny, 5'5″ little girl serial killer. There’s no way. No way! Give me a gang of 25 people. Natalie is terrifying, psychotic and horrible, and I am sure it is part of the psychology of what happens when you play a charatcer that long, but I judt didn’t want that to be the end of Sara.”

So, will Grissom follow Sara into the Las Vegas sunset? Only time will tell …