"Confront" seems rather a tactical choice of words. I'd say that yelling "Where'd you learn to drive, you Army Word idiot?" and going your own way is confronting somebody; what he did, according to the news report, could be more like an attack.
Now, what the DA's probably wondering is, what options did the kid have besides going up to the driver and punching him out? In many states (well, probably everywhere as an informal matter) something called a "reasonable man" test is applied in the aftermath of use of deadly force. They might be arguing that a reasonable man would have sought refuge, perhaps by running someplace where a car couldn't follow. You can see where the physical circumstances of that final confrontation would play into this.
That's just one part of the official Monday-morning quarterbacking concerning how else one might have solved the problem, and whether the threat (to which in most states, usually, you're allowed to react proportionately) was still in effect or had dissipated, etc.
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Though the deceased is not physically described in the article, the fact that the teenager was a very large (6-foot-6, 300 pounds) athlete a third his age will doubtless figure into this as well.
So will a lot of other things, many of which would not appear in initial (or possibly any other) media reports, all of them filtered through the ritualized artificial world of the justice system. One of them will be state of mind.
Another will be whether the guy really did purposely run him over. So will what he was doing in the moments leading up to the bane punchout: trying to get away? trying to run him down again? screaming something provocative? apologizing? just sitting there with his mouth hanging open?
Along with the drug states of both parties.
The real world is messier and more subtle than it sometimes seems in the newspapers -- and definitely more so than when the lawyers and spokesmen on either side are trying to spin it their way. That's why we have juries. I must admit that there could be more to this than presently meets the eye.
The one thing I can make a high-confidence guess about, based on the WNBC story, is that the now deceased driver had three miles in which to disengage at any time, and as a man in his 50s might even have used his putative superior maturity to take advantage of them, but instead followed his opponent home. The defense may well focus on that, arguing that it was his fight to start or not.
--Joe
