So I been lurking for a day or so, very interesting stuff.
Just joined up, as requested by wenwe4. I had never even heard of this case until a couple of days ago when I followed a link from a news page. Holy Mackerel! Poor guy! And what a whack job of a bimbo.
I hope it's OK for a noob to jump right in. So here goes...
I'm no gun expert, but I've been around them a bit. A .25 is about the worst possible gun you could get for this, or almost any attempt to inflict real harm on a human being. She could not have planned this any worse if she had tried.
With that being said, I know a lot of the curiosity has surrounded the chain of events (which came first, gun or knife?). Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I saw somewhere that the bullet went in somewhere around his right eye and was lodged near his left cheek. This is a VERY weak projectile. When you consider that the 9mm that Gabby Giffords took to the forehead (I think) went all the way through and it was not shot as close as this .25 probably was.
My thinking is, since she is left-handed, she fired a shot with the gun against his head, maybe around his temple. The bullet penetrated somewhere around his eye, then traveled into his skull, but was deflected through his sinus cavity and didn't have the oomph to exit and stopped when it hit the inside of his left cheekbone.
The recoil and noise of the gun, as negligible as it was, considering the caliber, startled her and she dropped the gun, thinking she had done the deed. Travis got nothing more than a punch to the face/side of the head, which would have stunned and dazed him, but no way it was lethal. So now he falls/climbs out of the shower and raises himself up to the sink, looks in the mirror and by now has a spewer of a nosebleed, thus all the blood from his nose and mouth in the postmortem photos and all the blood around the sink.
She would have had no way of knowing whether the one shot would be lethal, so she probably had a knife of some kind (might have been a hunting knife that went missing in the burglary but nobody reported it; there were long guns in the cabinet, so grampa is probably a hunter). When he survived the gunshot, she had to go to plan B. Having seen all kinds of people on TV get stabbed and drop, she figured one stick would do him. Almost all lethal stabbings are of the multiple entry wound variety.
OK, this is just my opinion, as you folks say, so take it for what its worth.
Good to meet y'all and we'll see how this thing turns out.
