I would use daemontools or such to keep mysql running on the system incase of undesired shutdown of the database servers. However, as everyone else noted here, killing of database servers is really a bad idea in the production environment.
To answer the question of mysql would not start, its because mysql init script checks for the pidfile of the mysqld, I am not sure if it checks for the validity of the pid, and then the stalelock might be stopping mysql to start. Best is to do service mysql restart or /etc/init.d/mysql restart to ensure mysql is starting from base.
Ensure that mysql service is running with ps and service mysqld status
Also check the logs of mysqld, to check whether there was a clean startup of the process and all the databases/tables were properly initialized.
