You bring up a good point ... was the perp that collected five more ‘pills’ already dead or just severely wounded? If he was already departed, I don’t think blasting away at a corpse is illegal. Weird maybe, but illegal? Misdemeanor at best. Now if the perp could have eventually recovered from his head shot, IMO it is still self-defense because you can bet that a year or two down the road they would find the pharmacist in a ditch with several bullet holes in his back.
But what I am most concerned about is this: the dead kid was black. So is the majority of the prison population. A white guy in prison for killing a black guy won’t last two weeks.
Yes, and more to the point: The pharmacist would have no way of really knowing the condition of the perp that went down. All he knows is the guy is down. He likely had no idea what sort of injury had been sustained. There wasn’t yet enough time to look him over. The video doesn’t show the perp on the floor. When he goes down he drops out of frame. So did he move? Was he saying anything? Was he trying to get up? We don’t know.
My hunch is that the pharmacist came back in, saw the guy start to move, believed he was still a threat and fired more shots. In fact I’d say it’s prima facie evidence that he believed the perp was still a threat— otherwise he wouldn’t have needed the extra shots.
It’s important to remember that the pharmacist didn’t start this fight. He simply finished it. That shouldn’t be a crime in anybody’s universe.