Pretti was clearly out of control.
Pretti was on the ground being beaten. He had been disarmed. The only part of him still out of their control was he continued to film them with his cell phone. That is as far from being out of control as one can be.
I think he got shot because he was reaching for a weapon and came out with a dark object.
We know for a fact that Pretti did not reach for a weapon, or even have a weapon. He was holding a "dark object" in his hand, but had been holding the cell phone in his hand from the beginning. The ICE agents wanted him to stop filming them, so they knew it was a cell phone.
If Pretti practiced deescalation he would be alive today.
Pretti was disarmed, and on the ground being beaten. There is no much further one can deescalate from there. While he could have handed his cell phone over to be destroyed, that is not technically deescalation.
I think Pretti fucked up in deciding to resist arrest.
He was not being arrested, so could not have been resisting arrest. He was resisting handing his cell phone over to be destroyed. That is resisting the destruction of evidence.
Having it on his person is possession.
He didn't have the gun in his possession when killed. Beyond that, if we have the right to kill in "self defense" anyone who has a gun in their possession, then there will be a lot of alt right posters dead.
and that officer started yelling "Gun!" then the other officers present would take that to mean Pretti had a gun and was a lethal threat.
OK, so now you have moved on to mistaken self defense. The problem with mistaken self defense is that they lied and destroyed evidence. So they need to convince a jury that while they did lie and destroy evidence, they are telling the truth about their frame of mind. They would have to basically say, "while I did lie on 19 out of 20 things, I am telling the truth on the 20th, and while I did destroy evidence, that evidence would have cleared me."
