A man arrested in the hit-and-run death of a police officer was found strangled in his cell, and investigators focused Tuesday on guards at the suburban Maryland jail, which has a history of security lapses.

Running over and killing a cop (or anyone) is bad, but vigilante justice is at least just as bad. What I find particularly interesting is the County Executive’s statement that someone arrested for running over and killing a cop and kept in a locked jail cell by himself to “protect him from other prisoners” and is later found with two broken bones in his neck caused by either human hands or a boot on his neck was not “the result of police officers seeking revenge, saying the slaying was ‘unrelated to any act’ by police.”

Pray do tell, who, other than the people running the jail, who I would suppose to be officers and agents of the law, would have access to keys with which to unlock a jail cell in order to strangle someone? Sorry, but I’m not coming up with any plausible scenarios.