Latrena May’s killing in 2015 led to years of court fights before a second conviction restored the same punishment this spring.
EAST ORANGE, N.J. — The resentencing of Andre Higgs to life in prison has brought Latrena May’s name back into public view nearly 11 years after the 27-year-old teacher was shot to death outside her home as she tried to reach a police officer for help.
Though the latest development is a court ruling from March 20, the story remains anchored in the person at its center. May was a teacher at Pride Academy Charter School in East Orange, a young mother and the subject of funeral notices and local television reports that captured a city’s shock in the days after the shooting. The case matters now because the legal system has spent years revisiting how responsibility for her death should be judged, and because that long process has ended, for the second time, with a jury and a judge concluding that Higgs should spend the rest of his life in prison.
May’s death was first reported not as an abstract case number but as the killing of a schoolteacher. In May 2015, local news coverage described a small child left without her mother. An obituary published soon after said May had been “suddenly” taken away on May 1 and listed services at Paradise Baptist Church in Newark. Those pieces of early public record did not settle the criminal case, but they fixed the community meaning of it. Before the appeals, before the retrial and before the sentencing this year, there was already a shared understanding in East Orange and Newark that a young educator’s life had ended violently and in public. That civic memory helps explain why the case returned so forcefully when prosecutors announced in March that Higgs had once again received a life term.
The fatal encounter happened late on May 1, 2015, after an argument between May and Higgs outside her home on Tremont Avenue, according to prosecutors. They said May ran from the home to escape an attack and flagged down a police vehicle. East Orange Detective Kemon Lee stopped and began to approach. Higgs then fired multiple shots at May, prosecutors said. Lee returned fire and hit Higgs in the legs. The defendant retreated into the house, where May’s 4-year-old daughter was still asleep, and eventually was arrested after barricading himself inside. In its most basic form, the case has always been about that sequence: a woman in immediate danger, an officer arriving in time to see the crisis, and gunfire coming before rescue could take hold.
What followed in court was long, technical and far removed from the street where May died. Higgs was convicted in 2017 and sentenced to life. In 2023, however, the New Jersey Supreme Court reversed the conviction and ordered a new trial. The justices said defense lawyers should have received Lee’s internal affairs file and may have been able to use prior on-duty shootings to question him, because the defense position was that Lee fired first. The court also found problems with an officer’s lay-opinion testimony about video evidence and with the admission of Higgs’ old convictions for impeachment. For May’s family and community, that ruling meant the case was no longer finished. For the legal system, it meant the state had to prove the killing again under corrected rules.
Prosecutors did exactly that at a retrial that ended Dec. 23, 2025 with a second guilty verdict. Higgs was convicted again of first-degree murder and multiple weapons counts. Essex County Superior Court Judge Ronald Wigler then sentenced him on March 20, 2026 to life on the murder count, publicly described as 75 years, plus 20 years for related weapons offenses. Under New Jersey’s parole rules, prosecutors said, he must serve 85% of the murder sentence before he becomes eligible for release, almost 64 years. Deputy Chief Assistant Prosecutor Justin Edwab said the result was possible because witnesses again returned to testify about the killing. His statement framed the retrial not as a lesser replay but as a second test that produced the same answer from a new jury.
The case also drew repeated attention because of who saw part of it happen. Lee was not an investigator arriving after the fact. He was a detective who encountered May while she was trying to flag him down. That made him central both to the prosecution’s narrative and to the Supreme Court’s decision to order a retrial. Prosecutors later called him “a hero” for trying to save her. The defense saw him as important for another reason: his account and weapon use had to be tested more fully in front of a jury. The court agreed that the first trial did not allow enough room for that challenge. The retrial, then, became a dispute not over whether May died, but over whether the process around one key witness had been fair enough. The second conviction suggests jurors still found the state’s case persuasive even with that added scrutiny.
Seen from the community outward, the case has always carried two clocks. One stopped in 2015 when May was killed. The other kept moving through hearings, appeals and a second trial. The March 20 sentencing did not bring back the person whose name first gave the case its local meaning. It did, however, bring a measure of legal finality after a decade in which that finality repeatedly shifted. In practical terms, Higgs is headed back to prison for life. In human terms, the case remains attached to a teacher, a family, a child inside the home and a city that learned the details first not from an appellate opinion but from the shock of a woman killed on her own block.
As of now, the case stands with a second murder conviction and a new life sentence in place. The next milestone will be whether Higgs files another appeal after the March 20, 2026 resentencing.
Author note: Last updated April 14, 2026.