I have a friend who, as a teenager, killed a man while driving drunk.
They spent some time in jail (a week or two, white person) - went to rehab for a while, got sober, and turned their life around.
Not a day goes by that they don’t think about the life they ended.
In the meantime, they’ve started and built a company that employs nearly a hundred people, and has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars towards any avenue that might prevent their story from repeating.
That’s sad and it seems like your friend has done the best with a bad situation.
This situation is different. While your friend was wrong, tragically wrong, to drive drunk he did not intentionally wreck and kill that other person. There wasn’t hate involved. It was negligence. Still worthy of criticism and he paid the consequences for his actions, but it is truly forgivable especially if he has spent his life atoning for what happened.
These two… they beat that man to the death. They didn’t care if he lived or if he died. It wasn’t an accident.