Sounds like a “hold mah beer - hey watch this” moment ....... In the boonies we carried capture poles for bad doggies and sniks etc etc ...... I think the post above about the LEO in the attic shooting at vs up towards the snake is the plausible scenario that killed the kid.
Mythbusters did a show on falling bullets , projectiles fired from handguns and pretty much proved a hit from a round dropping from the sky , fired from the ground , hasn’t enough force to kill or seriously injure. I’d suggest from here on the couch with information provided this was a horizontal high velocity hit vs vertical artillery impact.
Stay safe !
To clarify, the Mythbusters demonstrated that a bullet fired straight up will not fall back to Earth with enough force to cause serious harm. That is, a bullet that exhausts all of its momentum and is propelled by gravity alone. Those bullets tumble, and are slowed greatly by air friction. They have a relatively low terminal velocity, and if one conked you on top of the head, you'd say "ow."
But go a few degrees off vertical, and you're not dealing with a falling body any more. You have a projectile in a ballistically-stable arc, still spinning from the rifling in the barrel, and still retaining some momentum form the powder charge that fired it. Those are the bullets that frequently injure innocent bystanders, sometimes as far as two miles from where the shot was fired. The Mythbusters addressed that, too, not with an experiment but in interviews with an ER doc and a review of the medical literature.