I don’t disagree with that. But you’d be operating with the unfounded assumption that he would NOT have died without the officer’s pressure on him. Prior to an autopsy or expert analysis, you could not accurately claim that.
The inverse is also true, but it's still not particularly relevant to my point outside of the rough example i gave previously.
Certainly, before people knew all the drugs he was on,
Irrelevant to the definition of killing unless they were an immediate life threatening danger* (which alters the context)
(* by which i mean, would have died in the same way, in the same rough time window without any outside interaction)
and how he was struggling to breathe while in the car
Same as above.
it’s not an unreasonable assumption to think he was killed, as it looked like it.
Not an assumption, dictionary definition of killing.
I don't think it'll make a difference but here is an actual definition : https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/killing
Note the lack of a requirement for it to be intentional.
But unlike the bullet that killed Thompson, being knelt on like that would not kill most people.
irrelevant , A peanut wouldn't kill most people.
The "potential" lethality of the act doesn't matter if the outcome is death.
So calling it unequivocally a killing prior to additional evidence, like you are, is unreasonable.
Again, killing is a reasonable conclusion for an action that causes a death that would otherwise not occur in that rough window of time.
Seems you're thinking of murder (or manslaughter) which legally has a component of intention, rather than killing.
Intention is separate from killing, but i don't think you're going to accept that.