Monit not waiting for stop script to exit?

[jason]

I have had problems with my apache processes not fully exiting quickly 
enough to free up the TCP listeners when restarted by monit. So in the 
/etc/init.d/http script, I have added:

stop() {
       echo -n $"Stopping $prog: "
       killproc $httpd
       sleep 15
       echo
       return 0
}

But in my /var/log/messages file, I see entries such as this:

May  7 18:23:35 lenny monit[25262]: HTTP: error receiving data -- Resource 
temporarily unavailable 
May  7 18:23:35 lenny monit[25262]: 'apache' failed protocol test [HTTP] at 
INET[www.buberel.org:80] via TCP 
May  7 18:23:35 lenny monit[25262]: 'apache' trying to restart 
May  7 18:23:35 lenny monit[25262]: 'apache' stop: /etc/init.d/httpd 
May  7 18:23:37 lenny monit[25262]: 'apache' start: /etc/init.d/httpd 

Notice that the time period between the stop and start is only 2 seconds. 
How could this be the case?

I am running v4.9 on redhet el3.

Thanks,
Jason