COEUR d'ALENE - Jurors on Friday deliberated for about four hours without a decision to resolve a case that's already six years old, and is being re-tried after the Idaho Supreme Court tossed out the first verdict.

The 1st District Court jurors, seven women and five men, are scheduled to resume their work in the re-trial of 51-year-old Jonathan W. Ellington on Monday at the Kootenai County courthouse.

Ellington, of Athol, is charged with second-degree murder and aggravated battery, stemming from a run-in with a family on rural Kootenai County roads southwest of Athol on New Year's Day 2006.

Ellington is accused of killing Vonette Larsen, 41, also of Athol, after running her over with his Chevrolet Blazer on Scarcello Road after she exited her car at the end of a high-speed chase of Ellington. She was killed in front of her husband, Joel Larsen, and two of their daughters, Jovon and Joleen Larsen.

During closing arguments, Kootenai County deputy prosecutor Art Verharen said Ellington was in a "rage" that day and menaced Jovon and Joleen Larsen when he first happened to encounter them while out driving his Blazer north on Ramsey Road just south of its intersection with Brunner Road.

Describing the fatal ending of the chase, Verharen argued that Ellington rammed his Blazer into the daughters' vehicle, pushing it 48 feet and partially off the roadway before two tires furrowed into the soil and stopped the vehicles' advance. He then reversed, shifted in drive, accelerated, and then drove at Vonette Larsen who was running across the road to help her daughters, Verharen said.

"He's not driving in the lane that's open to him" to escape the confrontation with the Larsens, Verharen said. "He's driving in the lane with Vonette Larsen in it."

Public defender John Adams said Ellington was a man being hunted by the Larsens. Adams said the Larsens chased him with two vehicles and a .44-caliber Magnum revolver after the initial encounter with the Larsen sisters. The chase of Ellington continued through multiple changes of directions, a U-turn, some hiding by Ellington, and speeds of 90 mph.

Ellington eventually was cornered on Scarcello, with Vonette and Joel Larsen's Subaru passenger car blocking one lane of traffic and the sisters' Honda Accord blocking the other.

"So Jonathan Ellington didn't run away good enough?" Adams said. "He didn't try and escape Joel Larsen's .44 Magnum good enough?"

With the massive silver and black revolver in hand, and standing right in front of the jury box, Adams asked them, "If he'd pointed that gun at your head, would you have driven slowly away from the scene like you're in a school zone, looking both ways?"

Testimony by Joel Larsen was that he pointed the revolver at Ellington, but he didn't shoot because his daughters were in the line of fire.

Like his wife, Joel Larsen got out of their vehicle when his daughters' car was being pushed by the Blazer.

He said he fired one shot at the Blazer's motor. Another round hit the rear side of the Blazer, but the two sides disagree about when exactly Joel Larsen fired that shot, either before or after Vonette Larsen was run over.

Ellington confronted the two Larsen sisters earlier in the day when he apparently got angry at how fast they were driving. After pulling up behind them, he passed, then stopped right in front of them just south of the Ramsey-Brunner intersection stop sign. He got out of his vehicle and yelled at them, then hit a window of their car with his fist.

The sisters followed Ellington after the initial encounter and called their parents to help chase Ellington. They also called 911.

Adams told the jury, "She's dead because Joel Larsen took his wife and a gun and went hunting a man."

Adams said Ellington has already spent six years in custody for Vonette Larsen's death, and that's enough.

He called her death a tragedy, and then asked the jurors not to compound that by convicting Ellington for a terrible accident.

"They charged him with murder," he said. "If they didn't prove it, let him go."

Verharen criticized Ellington for not reporting to the authorities that he'd just run a woman over, and for not telling a good friend about what happened, after he went to that friend's home immediately after the incident.

"That should tell you something about his state of mind," Verharen said.

The jury has to decide, most importantly, whether Ellington deliberately ran Vonette Larsen over.

Short of second-degree murder, the jury also could find him guilty of voluntary manslaughter, vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence, or vehicular manslaughter without gross negligence.

The two aggravated battery charges stem from his allegedly ramming the sisters' car.

He was convicted at trial in 2006, but the state's high court overturned that and allowed a new trial after a prosecution witness lied on the witness stand. That witness, an Idaho State Police officer, did not testify in this second trial.