“My clothes got real hot,” the 60-year-old told jurors inside a Montgomery County courtroom, “so I took off my clothes.”

His testimony covered dramatic events that sent bullets flying through the afternoon sunshine of a townhouse community where residents still talk about it two years later. The jury’s verdict fell short of all that prosecutors tried to prove, but likely will yield a stiff prison term when the case concludes in November at Savage’s sentencing.

Jurors wrestled with the concept of “imperfect self-defense,” according a note they sent to Circuit Judge Christopher C. Fogleman during deliberations. That defense, commonly raised in murder cases, holds that the accused is not guilty of murder if — in his mind — he acted reasonably. “The jury is trying to try to figure out what the defendant was thinking in the moment, and that can be really hard to know,” said Cecelia Klingele, a University of Wisconsin law professor and expert on self-defense laws.

Jurors were introduced to the lives of two men — Whali Shabazz, 42, who was killed, and Savage, who shot him. Both grew up in small cities in North Carolina. Shabazz struggled early in life but became a fun-loving and hard-working driver of dump-trucks, commercial snowplows and 18-wheelers, according to his family.

“He’d call from the road all the time and make me laugh, sometimes about different things he loved to eat,” his sister Eugenia Davis recalled in an interview. “I remember him saying, ‘I’m on my way to Mexico, and I’m about eat me some rattlesnake.’”

Savage earned a political science degree in 1985 from Elizabeth City State University, served in the U.S. Army and in 2019 self-published the memoir “Hope I’m Making Sense, Thanks,” under the pen name Butch Wyatt. The book recounted his two-year-old son dying of leukemia, his suicide attempts and his decades-long struggle with crack-cocaine addiction. “I tried to do other normal things,” he testified at his trial, “but I intertwined my drug use with that, and everything fails — marriage, everything.”

In opening statements, prosecutors stressed that their case was straightforward: Savage had recently moved to Florida, became enraged that his estranged wife, Amber Tucker, 41, was seeing someone else, and sent her text and Facebook messages stating what he intended to do about it.

“I’m coming to the house, and whoever tries to stop me along with you will be shot in the face,” he wrote, according to trial evidence.

“I will show the world,” he also texted, “a husband’s last stand.”

Savage did so, according to prosecutors, by opening fire on Shabazz and Tucker after they’d scrambled out of Shabazz’s SUV on the afternoon of Sept. 3, 2021. He shot Shabazz three times, including a final round in the forehead, prosecutors said. Then he fired at least twice at Tucker but missed, according to prosecutors, as she ducked for cover behind a nearby pickup truck and Savage climbed atop the SUV to get a better vantage point.

“Luckily for her,” Assistant State’s Attorney Jim Dietrich told jurors, “he runs out of bullets.”

Savage and his attorneys countered that Shabazz also was armed and pointed his weapon first — even if it was still encased inside a black sock. They argued that Savage’s behavior was governed by a four-day crack binge that stopped only five minutes before the shooting. Also at play, they said, were the long-standing effects of an Army accident — an assertion that arced the narrative heard by jurors back to the 1980s.

“Did something happen to you when you were in Korea?” one of his attorneys, Isabelle Raquin, asked Savage.

“Yes, my tank went off a cliff,” he said. “I was inside the tank.”

The 20-foot fall, he testified, injured his back and head and left him with post-traumatic stress disorder.

He eventually made his way to Maryland, met Tucker and they married in 2012. Five years later, after leaving their home days and months at a time, Savage was gone for good. He went in and out of treatment and mental health programs and bouts of living in his car. In Baltimore in 2020, Savage told jurors, he was beaten blind in one eye. By the spring of 2021, he’d moved to Tampa, settled into an apartment and was clean again.

“Got my three-month sober chip,” he wrote in a text message to Tucker, referring to a marker presented at Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

“Yesss,” she wrote back.

But the messages soon turned dark, according to trial evidence. “My dreams and PTSD tells me my wife and her boyfriend will die,” he wrote on Aug. 27, 2021.

Shown those and other words during the trial, Savage said they reflected his daily drug and alcohol consumption: $300 worth of crack and a case worth of Natural Ice beer.

“I get to blaming. Unfortunately, my wife used be the blunt of that,” he testified. “I used to say stuff to try to get her attention. … I never meant none of that, anything bad I said.”

Many of messages and phone calls to Tucker went unanswered, according to trial evidence.

She lived in her townhouse with her five children, ages 9 to 21 at the time, worked as a truck driver and helped care for an older relative. She’d met Shabazz in 2021. On Sept. 3 of that year, the two took the relative to a podiatrist, stopped at Chick-fil-A and got milkshakes. Back home, after bringing the relative inside, they sat inside Shabazz’s parked Escalade discussing what they might do next. Tucker spotted a small blue car — noticeable because none of her neighbors drove it — pull up from her left. A man got out and walked toward them.

“Oh s—,” she told Shabazz, according court records. “Look, there’s my husband coming up.”

Shabazz got out of his driver’s seat and headed for the rear of his SUV. What happened next is disputed.

Savage testified that Shabazz told him, “I got something for you” as he opened up the rear of his SUV, reached inside and pulled out what Savage immediately knew was a gun — even if he couldn’t see it.

“He pointed the sock at me,” he testified, adding that he could see the silhouette of the weapon inside.

In response, Savage said, he pulled out his own gun and fired three rounds at Shabazz.

Dietrich, the prosecutor, told jurors the story made no sense because it rested on the notion that Shabazz had time to get the gun but didn’t have the time to unsheathe it from the sock: “That’s ridiculous. Who does that?”

Evidence found at the scene cut both ways. There was indeed a loaded, .22-caliber revolver found near Shabazz’s body, suggesting Shabazz had taken it out of the SUV. But it was still in the sock and hadn’t been fired.

Prosecutors called Savage’s estranged wife, Tucker, to the witness stand. She recounted that after Savage shot Shabazz, Savage went after her as she took cover behind a nearby orange pickup.

“What was the defendant doing?” Assistant State’s Attorney Lauren Turner asked.

“Aiming the gun towards me and shooting,” Tucker said, adding that “at least two to three shots were fired in my direction.”

At some point, according to witness testimony, Savage climbed atop Shabazz’s SUV to try to get a better view.

He climbed down, removed the clip from his semiautomatic handgun, threw it and the gun onto the ground, and stripped naked. He also called his mother in North Carolina.

“I just wanted to hear her voice,” he told jurors, admitting under cross examination that he told her, “I shot Amber’s boyfriend.”

But Savage was adamant that he never fired any shots at Tucker. Defense attorneys Isabelle Raquin and Steve Mercer noted that police found only three shell casings at the scene — and the number matched the gunshot wounds to Shabazz.

They stressed that Savage’s crack and beer consumption not only left him incapable of forming “specific intent,” it was confirmed by his behavior.

“The signs of intoxication in this case, I mean you can really take your pick,” Raquin told jurors. “And objectively speaking, when you have somebody who is rambling, talking to himself, going on top of a vehicle then jumping off, undressing from head to toe, being butt naked in broad daylight, I mean you clearly know these are objective signs of someone who does not know what he’s doing, someone who has no intent to hurt.”

Savage told jurors he hadn’t come to Maryland to harm Tucker or Shabazz, but to give a family member his car before checking into drug rehab.

Prosecutors stressed his text messages, written before the trip, were proof of his purpose.

They noted that additional shell casings could have gotten lost in grass near Shabazz’s body, or kicked away by first-responding medics and patrol officers. And they stressed that two of the discovered shell casings were on the passenger side of the SUV, near where Savage was standing when he fired at Tucker. Prosecutors urged jurors to convict Savage of premeditated, first-degree murder for fatally shooting Shabazz and attempted, premeditated first-degree murder for shooting at Tucker.

Jurors deliberated for nine hours. They acquitted Savage of murder but guilty of voluntary manslaughter in Shabazz’s death. To reach that conclusion, according to their 36 pages of jury instructions, they had to conclude Savage acted in imperfect self-defense. The jury was less forgiving on his actions toward Tucker: Guilty of first-degree attempted murder. That count is punishable by up to life in prison.

Neither side would say what sentence they would seek in November. But Savage’s sister, Kathy Savage Davis, said that instead of prison her brother needs mental health and drug treatment. “He couldn’t get set free of that crack cocaine,” she said. “It was like a demonic possession.”