Probably fair to assume that the shooter was aiming for center of mass. A stationary person at 180m is pretty easy to hit in the chest, and someone with enough skill/confidence might have opted to aim for the head, but nobody is aiming specifically for the neck. A hit on the neck almost definitely means the shooter was aiming for something else and missed high (or low) by inches in a way that still hit the guy.

It has long been used as a transitive verb. The Oxford English Dictionary has collected examples going as far back as 1897 using it generically to make something disappear, but this particular meaning, of government officials forcibly abducting a person and not explaining where the person went, really started to pick up by the 1960’s. The novel Catch-22, published in 1961, had a character use it in the transitive way, with the protagonist complaining that it wasn’t even proper grammar. And that novel was popular enough that it started to appear a lot shortly afterwards, in magazines and newspapers and books.