Editor’s note: This article has been corrected from its original version.

A Colquitt County Superior Court judge sentenced Blake Samples on Wednesday to an eight-year prison sentence in the slaying of Dustin “Dusty” Carroll. The incident occurred during a 2013 confrontation at Sample’s ex-wife’s residence.

Judge Jim Tunison also ordered Samples, of Moultrie, to pay $5,000 in fines and to perform 200 hours of community service, and, after release, to keep a curfew and submit to drug and alcohol monitoring, evaluation and treatment.

Samples, 36, who has been jailed since May 2014, entered a guilty plea to a single count of voluntary manslaughter in May of this year. The Colquitt County District Attorney’s Office, in the plea agreement, dismissed charges of malice murder, felony murder, aggravated assault and four counts of possession of a firearm during the commission of a crime.

Samples admitted to fatally shooting Carroll during an altercation on April 29, 2013, at the 1308 Hwy. 33 residence of Kayla Samples. Kayla Samples had moved into that residence a few weeks prior to the shooting.

The Georgia Department of Corrections will decide if Samples will get credit for time served. He will be able to apply to the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles for early release in a few years.

Prosecutors and Carroll’s family members had asked for a life prison sentence.

The sentence was a “surprise,” Carroll’s uncle, the Rev. Billy Wilkes Jr., said during an interview after the sentencing.

“I think it’s a shame — to take a man’s life and get eight years,” he said. “I don’t see how when you took a man’s life, and you took his kids’ lives away from him.”

In May 2014 Superior Court Judge Harry J. Altman II revoked Samples’ bond two weeks after Moultrie police said he confronted officers with a gun outside a residence in the 1200 block of Highland Boulevard. In that incident, a relative of Samples’ told police that Samples came home intoxicated and took a gun from the relative’s nightstand.

Police said that once they arrived Samples refused orders to drop the pistol, and at one point raised it in an officer’s direction. The officer reported that because Sample’s finger was not on the trigger of the weapon he continued talking with him and when he and other officers backed away Samples ran into a wooded area.

Samples turned himself in on the same day of his scheduled bond hearing, which he waived, and Altman revoked his $85,000 bond.

Assistant District Attorney Jim Prine noted that Samples never revealed the location of Carroll’s gun, the weapon used in the shooting, or the victim’s keys, which also were taken. Carroll drove himself to the hospital in his truck, which he cranked with a spare key.

Samples chose to confront Carroll on prior occasions before the slaying, Prine added.

“This man always brought it to him (Carroll),” he said. “Mr. Samples went to the house (Kayla Samples’). He did not have her permission to be there.”

When Kayla Samples would not answer his calls, Prine said, Blake Samples sent her a text using a vulgarity and telling her to answer the phone.

“Fifteen minutes later she was calling 911,” Prine said.

Samples addressed Tunison and Carroll’s family during the hearing, offering apologies to Carroll’s two children and others present.

“I hope and pray they will (have) some kind of closure,” he said. “There was no malice in my heart against Dusty. I did not go there that day to harm Dusty.”

To Tunison he said he begged “for leniency today, not just for me, but for my parents and my son.”

Since Samples never went to trial, there are unanswered questions in the case that will never have resolution, said Samples’ lawyer, Moultrie attorney Bert Jewell. These issues were behind the willingness of the district attorney’s office to accept a plea on the voluntary manslaughter charge.

During the hearing, Carroll’s former mother-in-law Sandy Martin asked Tunison to hand down a life sentence against Samples. She said that Carroll’s children have been severely impacted at the time of the slaying and that impact will continue in the future with all of the events in their lives they will never share with their father.

“Dusty was a good man,” she said. “He wasn’t perfect. He had a good heart. “Mr. Samples is a man full of rage and is a danger to society. We all plead that Mr. Samples spend a lifetime in jail for all the scars he left behind forever.”