a thug and burglar is going to be honest in any way shape or form? I've been robbed before (though by family members, not strangers). Of course when you catch them in the act, they use any excuse to beg for mercy. In my experience, the minute you show them that mercy, they take you down with a smirk.
The old man was in pain, frightened and defending himself.
The thing is, when you're old, your reflexes are slower by far than when you are young. So their reflexes to make a run for it were faster than his reflex to shoot them before they killed him. There's your "few seconds" between his legal right to use force and his actual pulling of the trigger. They set his defensive reactions in motion; his slower reflexes gave them time to turn tail. 
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