Everything about it looked like a robbery gone wrong, with a horror show backup plan.
As for Tim not fighting, I can personally guarantee you that nobody knows how somebody will react in such a high stress situation until it happens. I told a story on here before about a time two men attempted to rob me at knifepoint when I was walking home alone at night. I was a single parent and I had a one year old little boy at home with a sitter. I had a single 20 dollar bill in my bag. Two men, two large stiletto knives, dark street with no houses on the long section I was on, baby at home - the logical answer was clearly to give them the 20 dollars. What I did instead was start swearing at them. “I don’t have any ****ing money. **** off! **** you!” They were walking away from me now, turning a corner probably 15 feet away, and I’m still snarling at them and mocking them! I just did not stop talking and pushing. One guy kind of wheeled around and lunged toward me with the knife to scare me, and that finally snapped me out of the awful, crazy auto pilot I was on. I walked the rest of the way home terrified, both of what had happened and of my own reaction.
There was no calculating, no reasoned sense of self-preservation - it was 100% reaction, and my fear bubbled up and out as a kind of insane anger. All it might have taken was for Tim to instinctively grab for the gun somebody suddenly pulled on him to turn that situation horribly wrong.