Mr Manning,
OK... now I'm confused. But that's not really unusual.
On your webpage you say:
The police say he would have had to bend over and hold the barrel of the gun tightly to his chest to have killed himself. If this was the case then wouldn't his body have been in a different position?
But in the post above you say:
According to the ME and the police he would have been in the postion you see in the picture when he pulled the trigger for the bullet to go in the angle that it did.
Assuming he had to bend over and hold the gun tightly to his chest as you say on the webpage, the experiments we did say the shooter had to be flat on his back, or at least hold the gun down at that angle. In the position you see him in the crime scene, the bullet would not have followed the path the ME found.
The bullet hole is actually in his sternum. The barrel actually had to be pressed not only inward but also upward to travel that path.
Now I might be inclined to say that nobody kills himself with a shot to the sternum by a 22 rifle. But I'd be a hypocrite if I did, since I had a friend in Jr. High kill himself the same way on December 27, 1979. But I certainly don't think it is common. (Truthfully I never thought I'd hear of another such case.) By the same token nobody murders somebody that way either. If an assailant had the gun he would have shot your brother between the eyes. A 22 is not very effective unless it hits a vital organ. At the very least someone wanting to kill him would have shot him directly in line with his heart. It was the nearly vertical bullet path that took his life since the bullet hit the lung and aorta.
I believe your mother was misled by the police questioning her, and your brother most likely had not talked about contemplating suicide to her. The buying of the groceries doesn't necessarily mean anything since alcoholics don't think ahead and depression comes on them in waves. And people who drink often can perform tasks that require more dexterity much better than those who drink now and then. And I'm inclined to not trust the recollection of the 12-year-old neighbor. I doubt she made the story up, but she could have mistaken which night she saw the man. Even if this girl is extraordinary by academic standards, that would have no bearing on her credibility one way or the other. I have a nine-year-old in the gifted program that reads at highschool level and her maturity is about the level of any other nine-year-old.
But even still I'm more inclined to believe this was an accident. Perhaps he didn't know the bullet in the gun wasn't jammed this time, and he was examining the end of the barrel and leaned forward over the gun to reach something and somehow hit the trigger. He could have broken the instrument that dislodged the jammed bullet that same night dislodging it.
I believe if I were you, and simply was not convinced, I would want to know:
1) why they could not match a slug, that traveled only through soft tissue and knicked a rib, to his gun conclusively. That's suspicious to me. Even this type of cheap jamming rifle leaves spiral markings unique to that weapon.
2) why this gun wasn't checked to see if it had been recently fired.
3) if there was evidence he had changed from pants to shorts after returning home and before the shooting.
4) if there was evidence he climbed in through a window, used a credit card or ID card on the lock, or otherwise found an alternate way in when he got home. He may have lost his keys in one of his falls that resulted from his stumbling while he walked home that night. (My personal hunch is that the boss that found him took his keys.)