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"Hunting him down" would require an intent to kill him when he was posing no threat. The way they acted was extremely dumb, but their behavior does not match yours or MadMonzer's description.
They saw him jogging on the public street. They chased him in trucks for a bit until he got tired of running from them. When he turned on them, they killed him.
That is fairly characterized as hunting him down.
I told you what I think is necessary for that characterization to be fair, and it's entirely missing from the argument. What they did is bad enough, there's no need act like they were intending to kill him.
If they weren't intending to kill him, or at least holding reckless indifference to the possibility of killing him, then riding him down in trucks with guns out sure is a special way to not intend to do it.
If they intended to kill him, waiting to do that until they're grappling with him is an even more special way to do it.
They were reckless, that's my entire point. You're trying to ascribe intentionality to it, which is plainly inaccurate.
They never grappled with him. They shot him from a distance from their trucks. They were quite safe.
I take your larger point about the intent needed for the legal definition of muder. I don't much care to play mind reading games, other than noticing that for people not intending to kill him, they sure aggressively acted in a way that led to them shooting him. Riding someone down with trucks and brandished firearms is very aggressively manslaughtering then and I'd even say "hunting them down". Perhaps even murdering them depending on the jurisdiction.
Come on man, I was already dodging one snuff film, why are you making me look up another one (this one is mercifully frozen before the shot is fired, in case you feel the same way about these sorts of clips), that I had already largely purged from my memory...
My point isn't about the legal definition of murder. Charge these guys with murder for all I care, my point is about What This Says About Society. In my opinion the discourse about the shooting, and it's broader implications, would only be justified if these guys were actually intending to kill from the outset. If they were just reckless that's bad enough on it's own, we don't need to make up a whole story about "good ol' boys blowing away an outsider acting suspiciously in someone else's neighborhood".
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