Probably he paused when his chainsaw was turned on, so it stayed working altough it might not seem like that in your screen. That used to be a way of abusing to kill someone especially while camping on towers. (I'm sure he didn't mean to do that so don't get me wrong like I'm blaming him)
As for Lax, using the command /para costs you 15 HP normally. However, if you use the command under spawn protection it just disables your protection instead of removing your HP. So he probably just kept typing /para everytime he respawned and ran into pistol's "working" chainsaw.