This is much worse then stated above:
As the respawning player's controller upgrades to level four, they will gain three extra uses of safe mode (one for each update). If they use even one of these, this extends the time of the cycle by 20,000 ticks, meaning that no matter how fast you attack, they will still be able to respawn before their controller fully decays, with an overlap of more than 9000 ticks.