It was about 11:30 p.m. one night this week when 81-year-old Robert Jenkins heard someone break down the door of his Tucker home.

Jenkins, a retired state transportation worker, grabbed is .38-caliber pistol from a bedroom closet and confronted a lone intruder in the kitchen.

"When he saw me, he said, 'Give me that gun,'" Jenkins recalled Friday. "Then he lunged at me, so I shot him."

The first bullet hit the man in the chest, Jenkins said, "but he kept lunging for me and beating me" in the head and chest.

"So I shot him again," Jenkins said. That bullet hit the intruder in the neck.

"I just wondered how much longer he was going to live because I saw blood flowing out across the floor," Jenkins said by phone from the hospital. "It seemed like an hour, but I guess it was 45 seconds, and he was dead."

Peggy Jenkins, 71, was in the couple's bedroom dialing 911.

"I heard two shots," she said. "I knew someone was dead."

That someone was 25-year-old Jynard Marshall, an Atlanta man who broke into the elderly couple's home near Lawrenceville Highway on Tuesday night. Marshall previously had served prison time on a robbery and drug conviction in Fulton County.

DeKalb County police said the shooting was justified and they did not plan to charge Robert Jenkins, who accidentally fired a shot through his hand and hit his head during the struggle.

He was treated and released from Grady Memorial Hospital on Wednesday, but was being treated at Emory University Hospital on Friday for dehydration and mild bleeding on the brain. He expects to be released today.

If it happened again, "I'd do the exact same thing," Robert Jenkins said. "But I hope I don't have to."