Ersland, 57, is free on $100,000 bail, courtesy of an anonymous donor. He has won praise from the pharmacy's owner, received an outpouring of cards, letters and checks from supporters, and become the darling of conservative talk radio.
"His adrenaline was going. You're just thinking of survival," said John Paul Hernandez, 60, a retired Defense Department employee who grew up in the neighborhood. "All it was is defending your employee, business and livelihood. If I was in that position and that was me, I probably would have done the same thing."
District Attorney David Prater said Ersland was justified in shooting 16-year-old Antwun Parker once in the head, but not in firing the additional shots into his belly. The prosecutor said the teenager was unconscious, unarmed, lying on his back and posing no threat when Ersland fired what the medical examiner said were the fatal shots.
Anthony Douglas, president of the Oklahoma chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, called it an "execution-style murder" and praised the district attorney for bringing charges. Ersland is white; the two suspects were black.
Parker's parents also expressed relief that Ersland faces a criminal charge.
"He didn't have to shoot my baby like that," Parker's mother, Cleta Jennings, told TV station KOCO.
But many of those who have seen the video of the May 19 robbery attempt at Reliable Discount Pharmacy have concluded the teenager in the ski mask got what he deserved.
Mark Shannon, who runs a conservative talk show on Oklahoma City's KTOK, said callers have jammed his lines this week in support of Ersland, a former Air Force lieutenant colonel who wears a back brace on the job and told reporters he is a disabled veteran of the Gulf War.
"There is no gray area," Shannon said. One caller "said he should have put all the shots in the head."
Don Spencer, a 49-year-old National Rifle Association member who lives in the small town of Meridian, 40 miles north of Oklahoma City, said the pharmacist did the right thing: "You shoot more than enough to make sure the threat has been removed."
Barbara Bergman, past president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and a professor at the University of New Mexico School of Law, likened the public reaction to that of the case of Bernard Goetz, the New Yorker who shot four teenagers he said were trying to rob him when they asked for $5 on a subway in 1984.
Goetz was cleared of attempted murder and assault but convicted of illegal gun possession and served 8 1/2 months in jail.
Bergman said those who claim they used deadly force in self-defense have to show they were "in reasonable fear of serious bodily injury."
The pharmacy is in a crime-ridden section of south Oklahoma City and had been robbed before.
