As you mentioned the .25 and a .357 are totally different as far as power. The .25 is notoriously small and is basically 1 step up from a .22. But even though we know they can do a lot of damage too, it is the trajectory path that the bullet followed that is important. From what little I remember hearing about the path I seem to recall it missed most of his brain. I think it did hit his sinus cavities.
But in any event, there are tons of cases of people being shot and still having the wherewithall to keep moving for some period of time. It all depends and each case is totally different.
I dont want to bring up the chicken that lived for some months without its head again.
Not trying to convince anyone differently but I think the shot came first for a lot of reasons. One main reason is she brought the gun there and for her it would be the easiest way to kill him without getting too close to him and risk him stopping her. I think she brought it there and used it as her primary weapon. When the shell jammed, it ruined her initial plan.
By the way, small caliber guns like the .25 are notorious for jamming when you dont buy shells that have extra gunpowder. She would not have known that probably. I always buy special shells for all my semi-autos and it helps prevent gun jamming. It is the number of grains of powder that is listed on the box that you have to know what is regular and what is above average to use.
You are correct as well about the difference in power, but you have to keep in mind that a measure of a bullet's destructive power isn't just the caliber, but the velocity of the round. For example, you really couldn't hurt someone with a .50 caliber round if you just threw it at them. What a bullet does is not only bore a hole, but impart the kinetic energy of its velocity into the thing that it strikes. Which is why in the never-ending arguments over "stopping power" the concepts of "penetration" is so important. A .22 long penetrates a lot more than a .45, but the .45, even though it is lower velocity, imparts more of its energy into a target. Military rounds like the .223, basically .22 caliber, but longer, are designed to tumble to impart more energy into the target.
So many times talking about the difference between a .25 and a .357 in a contained space like a skull, is like arguing about which is worse, falling from 100 feet or 1000 feet when they answer is, as far as being dead, it doesn't make a lot of difference. Bullets have a sort of "terminal velocity" where the difference between blasting a cavitation wave through the brain and blowing someone's head clean off doesn't make any difference from the point of view of how dead they are.
The Medical Examiner was very clear that the bullet entered the brain. It didn't pass thorough the center of the brain, but it would have imparted energy through the brain as a whole.
Yes, people have survived head wounds, notably Gabby Giffords shot with a 9 mm. That doesn't mean she was running around immediately afterwards.
All recoil-operated self-loading pistols are subject to jamming when an underpowered round is used. However, most of the time that doesn't mean the spent shell doesn't eject, only that the next round doesn't feed properly. Often the solution is to pull the slide back, in which case the tell-tale sign of a jammed gun is an unfired round cleared from the ejection port.
The whole issue of jamming is just ad hoc rationalization to explain why only one round was fired when the tendency of people firing a gun is to keep firing. As we know little about the gun, the condition it was in, the ammunition, or any other relevant factors, then the issue of jamming is just an assumption to support another assumption which, alone, doesn't fit the opinion of the medical examiners, or physical evidence such as the spend casing laying in a pool of blood, or inductive generalizations about what people do when they are shot in the head.
Also, I don't get how Mike the Headless Chicken is analogous.
