Darren Wilson's Actions After Shooting: 'Very, Very Bad'

Police actions in the immediate aftermath of the shooting of Michael Brown were a long way from normal, according to grand jury transcripts, which reveal that officer Darren Wilson drove himself back to the station by himself, cleaned the blood off himself, and checked his own gun into evidence, all of which runs against Justice Department advice on how to handle evidence and crime scenes. Wilson's actions were "very, very bad from an investigative perspective," a former police chief who runs a consulting firm tells the Washington Post. His bloodied hands were never photographed because "a photographer wasn't available," per one investigator. One agent testified Wilson was worried about the "biohazard" presented by someone else's blood. One of Wilson's lawyers says "it was getting sticky and gross."

An investigator with the medical examiner's office also failed to take measurements at the scene of the shooting. (What he told the grand jury: "It was self-explanatory what happened.") More:

• Gov. Jay Nixon has rejected calls for special prosecutors to present the case to another grand jury. The director of Washington University's Juvenile Law and Justice Clinic said yesterday that a special prosecutor should be brought in, as the grand jury transcripts indicate the "prosecution quite unusually adopted a defense stance, injecting the idea of justified homicide into the process well before Wilson testified," reports the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
• Police have identified a Ferguson man killed during the unrest that followed the grand jury decision as Deandre Joshua, 20. Investigators believe he was shot in the head before he was set on fire, reports the New York Daily News. It's not clear whether his death was linked to the rioting, although one of the people mourning the man on Facebook was Dorian Johnson, who was with Brown when he was shot by Wilson.
• Ferguson was a lot calmer last night as light snow fell and the number of protesters dwindled, the AP reports. National Guard troops were posted at intersections, and although a group of 100 protesters blocked traffic at one point, there were no major confrontations.
• But in Los Angeles, around 130 people were arrested after what the LAPD says was "dangerous" behavior, including hitting vehicles and running through intersections, reports the LA Times.

(More Ferguson, Missouri stories.)