Lt. William Browne of the Wilmington, Delaware Police “did not violate police department policy or procedures” when he gunned down Derek Hale (left, in Iraq with a Marine buddy) on the front porch of a friend’s house last November 6. This was the long-anticipated and utterly predictable finding of the Wilmington Police Department’s Office of Professional Standards.

The supposed exoneration of Lt. Browne came after Delaware state Attorney General Beau Biden cleared him of violating state law when he shot Derek twice, at point-blank range, after the decorated Marine combat veteran had been hit with seven taser blasts in a little more than a minute. Derek, a retired Marine sergeant, was not the subject of an arrest warrant at the time, although he did belong to the Pagans, an “outlaw motorcycle club” that included several people under investigation for suspected narcotics and firearms offenses.

So Lt. Brown is now free to kill again. He will not be stopped unless the civil suit filed against him and others implicated in the murder and cover-up succeeds. On previous experience, it’s doubtful that such a lawsuit will produce that result, given that the murderous Lt. Brown has been “cleared” by the hierarchy of the gang that employs him.

Are there any Marine veterans in Wilmington who know Lt. Browne? If you’re out there, could you take him aside and have a friendly chat with him, expressing your opinion of someone who would gun down an unarmed, unresisting combat veteran, leaving his wife a widow and orphaning his stepchildren?

(My thanks to Anthony Gregory for alerting me to this infuriating, if predictable, development.)