Smith stood over the girl while she was already near dead and pumped her full of rounds with a finishing round under her chin, with a pistol her retrieved from another room.
If you are able to safely retrieve another weapon from a room then stand over that person and fill them full of lead with a chin shot as a finisher, YOU ARE NOT IN FEAR OF YOUR LIFE.
And that kids, is murder.
"When the female stopped moving, he dragged her by her clothes and into the workshop, too. There, he said, he noticed she was still gasping and didn’t believe she should suffer, so he gave her “a good clean finishing shot,” he said."
After finishing off both teens as they lay wounded, he waited more than 24 hours to notify anyone because he didn't want to disrupt people on "Thanksgiving".
“I saw it as a static situation,” he told police. He said he also thought for a bit that although his Thanksgiving was ruined, he didn’t have to ruin it for others by calling authorities that day.
https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/?id=609.065
I don’t think a reasonable person believes someone unarmed and dying in front of you is a threat of death or great bodily harm(why the jury did what they did) If he believed that, he probably wouldn’t come as close as he had to to deliver a ‘kill shot’ under the chin.
The Minnesota homeowner shot one in the head at point blank range after they were no longer a threat and recorded himself taunting before doing so. (Then he kept the bodies overnight before calling police.)