Oddly enough I saw a rerun of the mythbusters episode where they tested this one today.
It seems a true straight up shot wouldn’t have the energy to penetrate the skull but just a couple degrees off straight up allows the projectile to keep its ballistic energy.
I suspect they’ll be able to trace the bullet back to where it was fired from.
Pure horseshit.
2 degrees off plumb is still going to result in a bullet losing it’s spin, tumbling, and falling at terminal velocity. And if it does somehow manage to maintain spin, it’s going to fall ass end first and slightly cocked...not very aerodynamic and not a very good terminal velocity.
You have to be more than just a couple of degrees off to have any likelyhood of injury.
The speed of the bullet in the vertical direction will never be enough to kill someone, unless you get very unlucky. It is improbable that the vertical speed was enough to get through the roof of the church.
And the horizontal speed is a function of the angle. To use round fake numbers, if the bullet is fired at 1000 feet per second, but at a 45-degree angle, it will only be going 700 feet per second horizontally. At an 80-degree angle, the horizontal speed wouldn’t be enough to do serious damage, or get through a roof normally.
I think it more probably that the shot was relatively horizontal, but was deflected when it hit the roof, projecting downward at a high velocity.
Of course, you could get unlucky, and the bang to the head could have caused internal damage — did the story say the bullet actually penetrated his head?
I bet they won’t. They can’t get anywhere near a precise measurement of angles and points of entry to locate the source. Can’t be done for something like this.