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The bullet came down with that much inertia ?
Are they SURE that’s what happened ? I mean, really?

A bullet fired into the air comes back down with the same force as dropping a similar weight from a low flying helicopter. It zots ya but it won’t penetrate.

The Physics Behind Why Firing A Gun Into The Air Can Kill Someone

Would you fire a gun into the air in celebration if you knew that, when the bullet comes down, it could kill somebody? It's no surprise that bullets fired towards a target can easily destroy whatever they run into: a bullet from an AK-47 leaves the rifle traveling at over 1,500 miles per hour (670 meters per second): about double the speed of sound. Despite only having a mass of about five grams -- under a fifth of an ounce -- it's got the energy of a brick dropped from a 30 story building. Concentrated into a tiny surface area at the bullet tip, it can easily break through your skin. And once it does, that energy and momentum tears through your body, ripping a hole through blood vessels, muscle, and potentially vital organs. No wonder it can kill you.

But what if the bullet is fired up, rather than directly at a target? If you performed that experiment on the Moon, if the bullet went up at 1,500 miles per hour, then no matter what angle you fired it at and how long it took to come back to the lunar surface, it would come down at 1,500 miles per hour. A bullet fired away from the Moon's surface would be just as lethal as one fired across it. But on Earth, we have our atmosphere, which means we also have air resistance. A bullet fired straight up, with no wind, might reach a height of 10,000 feet (about three kilometers), but will come back down at only around 150 miles per hour: just 10% of the speed and with only 1% of the energy as the originally fired bullet.

...

If you must fire a gun into the air, the way to minimize your potential risk to yourself and others is to:

fire the bullet as close to vertical as possible (where it will lose the most speed),
from a low altitude location (where air resistance is higher),
in a rural, low-population-density area (where it's less likely to hit a person),
and to fire a lighter, larger bullet (with a lower terminal velocity).

And finally, as a bystander, know that you aren't completely safe from a hail of falling bullets until two minutes have passed since the final gunshot. Firing a gun into the air might be extremely unlikely to kill the person firing it, but there's a reason that most major cities have outlawed it: your freedom to celebrate ends when your celebration starts to kill innocent bystanders.

Everything you wanted to know, but forgot to ask about.
A superb website.
http://www.frfrogspad.com/qalist.htm

...The Haag article used a ballistics computation program to calculate vertically fired bullet performance and came up with results comparable with Hatcher’s work. Using bullets ranging from the .22 rim fire to the 180gr .30 caliber spitzer in the .30-06 the time of flight (up & back) ranged from a low of 25 seconds for the .25ACP to a long of 77 seconds for the M193 ball. Maximum altitudes ranged from a low of 2288 feet for the .25ACP to a high of 10,103 feet for the 180gr .30-06. Terminal velocities ranged from 134 f/s for a tumbling .22 Short to a high of 323 f/s for the 180gr .30-06...

http://www.frfrogspad.com/miscella.htm#straight