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When the defense attorney asked Daniel Jay Folsom whether he could remember that night in December 2011, he replied with a quiet "No."
"I don't really remember. I don't," he added. "I remember bits and pieces."
Those bits and pieces — regarding the alleged murder of his live-in girlfriend, Alicia Sherman — didn't provide much clarity when Folsom, now 54, testified in his defense Wednesday in 3rd District Court on the fifth day of a six-day jury trail.
A night of drinking with friends, which included several beers and shots of vodka and whiskey, left his memory "blacked out" for the most part, Folsom said. Based on what he can recall, though, he's sure he acted in self-defense.
When he came to in his Murray home that night, near 600 West and 5700 South, he remembered waking startled as Sherman was hitting him on the head. Folsom reacted, he said Wednesday, by "blocking shots."
"I'm blocking her hands," he told jury members. "I remember, at one point, grabbing her and pushing her away."
But the story jumps from there to vague fragments of seeing his neighborhood pass through the window of a police car, answering questions from investigators, giving a blood sample and feeling the scratches and bumps on his head. It's a piecemeal process for Folsom, charged with first-degree-felony murder, looking back to the event that happened nearly five years ago.
Prosecutor Bradford Cooley, though, said Folsom's recollections have been slightly different each time.
"It appears to me he has no knowledge as to what he's testifying to," Cooley said.
His shaky memory and the volatile relationship with "patterns of violence" between the couple, he said, are indications of what Cooley believes is Folsom's intentional involvement in Sherman's death. Trauma and swelling in her brain killed her four days after an apparent altercation Dec. 16, 2011.
Folsom and Sherman called police to respond to 11 different domestic arguments from 2004 to 2011, several resulting in formal charges for one or both parties, according to records presented to the court.
Nine of those calls, though, were initiated by Folsom, argued his attorney Robert Breeze, because he feared what Sherman would do to him. Folsom also filed, and subsequently dissolved, a restraining order in November 2009.
"She would say things like, 'If I could get away with it, I would just shoot you and get it over with,' " Folsom said, though Judge Elizabeth Hruby-Mills told the jury to disregard the statement.
Prosecutors focused on two incidents of violence between the two — one in 2004 and the other in 2009. In the first, Folsom and Sherman fought over a bike, and Murray police Officer Dale Rodeback testified that Sherman had a chipped tooth and marks on her neck from strangulation.
In the second, the two had a disagreement on Thanksgiving and Folsom spent the night in jail after Sherman told police he had held her at gunpoint and pistol-whipped her, Folsom said.
Folsom told the jury their relationship was always "risky business," but that he never hurt her or thought about killing her.
"I wouldn't do that," he said, holding back tears. "I loved her; I cared for her."
Roby Panter, Sherman's ex-husband, testified Wednesday that Sherman was "not violent at all" and he constantly questioned why she stayed with Folsom.
"She told me he was sorry, he was going to get help and do whatever it takes," Panter said.
Sherman's family and friends sat in the courtroom, wearing purple ribbons in her honor.
Twitter: @CourtneyLTanner