A second jury reached the same result after New Jersey’s top court ordered a retrial in the 2015 shooting of Latrena May.

NEWARK, N.J. — In New Jersey, Andre Higgs was sentenced on March 20 to life in prison for fatally shooting his former girlfriend, 27-year-old teacher Latrena May, outside her East Orange home in 2015 as she tried to flag down a police officer during a domestic violence attack.

The sentence closed the latest chapter in a case that has stretched across 11 years, two murder convictions and a ruling by the New Jersey Supreme Court that sent the case back for a new trial. Prosecutors said the second jury’s verdict, returned Dec. 23, 2025, again found Higgs responsible for killing May in front of an East Orange detective who had stopped to help. The immediate stakes now are narrow but significant: Higgs has again been ordered to spend the rest of his life in prison, while the case remains a marker of how domestic violence, police response and appellate review collided in one fatal moment.

The shooting began late on May 1, 2015, outside May’s home on Tremont Avenue in East Orange after an argument with Higgs, the father of one of her children. Prosecutors said the confrontation moved from inside or near the residence into the street when May ran from the home to escape him and tried to get the attention of a passing police vehicle. East Orange Detective Kemon Lee saw her distress, made a U-turn and got out of his car, according to trial accounts repeated by prosecutors and later news reports. Before Lee could reach her, authorities said, Higgs fired multiple shots at May. Lee returned fire and struck Higgs in the legs. The exchange ended the same way it began for May: in seconds, in public and at the exact moment she appeared closest to getting help.

After the gunfire, prosecutors said, Higgs retreated into May’s home, where her 4-year-old daughter was asleep. He barricaded himself inside before officers eventually arrested him. That detail gave the case an added layer of danger from the start, because officers were no longer dealing only with a homicide scene but with an armed suspect inside a home with a child still there. The public record does not suggest the child was physically injured, but the image of a sleeping child in the house as the suspect pulled back inside has remained central to the way prosecutors describe the case. At trial and sentencing, the state also stressed who May was beyond the final minutes of her life: a longtime teacher at Pride Academy Charter School in East Orange. Her 2015 obituary described funeral services in Newark days after her death, underscoring how quickly a local homicide became a community loss measured in vigils, school grief and family mourning.

The case first appeared settled years ago. Higgs was convicted and sentenced to life in prison in 2017. But in March 2023, the New Jersey Supreme Court unanimously reversed that conviction and ordered a new trial. The justices said trial errors had stacked up in ways that required starting over. Most notably, the court said the defense should have been given access to Lee’s internal affairs file and potentially allowed to question him about earlier on-duty shootings because the defense theory was that Lee may have fired first. The court also faulted the admission of certain lay-opinion testimony tied to video evidence and the use of Higgs’ remote prior convictions for impeachment. None of that changed the underlying allegation that Higgs shot May, but it did reset the legal process and forced prosecutors to prove the case again in front of a new jury.

They did. On Dec. 23, 2025, an Essex County jury convicted Higgs again of first-degree murder, second-degree unlawful possession of a handgun, first-degree unlawful possession of a handgun by a person previously convicted of a crime under the No Early Release Act, and second-degree certain persons not to have weapons. The repeat conviction mattered for two reasons. First, it showed that even after the state’s top court identified major trial errors, the prosecution’s evidence still persuaded a second jury. Second, it moved the case from a long appellate fight back into a sentencing phase with few mysteries. Essex County Superior Court Judge Ronald Wigler, who had presided over both the earlier proceedings and the retrial, imposed life on the murder count, described as a 75-year term, plus 20 years on related weapons charges. Under New Jersey law, Higgs must serve 85% of the murder sentence before he is eligible for release, which prosecutors said works out to nearly 64 years.

Prosecutors used the resentencing to frame the outcome as both punishment and validation. Deputy Chief Assistant Prosecutor Justin Edwab said the second conviction was possible because witnesses returned to testify again about what happened that night. He also called Lee “a hero” for trying to save May when she flagged him down. Essex County Prosecutor Theodore N. Stephens II announced the sentence in a March 20 release, giving the office a formal closing statement after years of litigation. But even at sentencing, some limits remained. The public summaries do not lay out every piece of forensic evidence introduced at the retrial, and they do not answer every question about the argument that preceded the shooting. What they do establish is a tight timeline, a named victim, a named defendant, a police witness at the scene and a final result that has now survived both a reversal and a second jury’s review.

For East Orange, the case has always carried a sharp human frame. May was not only a homicide victim in a court file. She was a 27-year-old educator whose death was first reported in local television coverage as the killing of a young teacher and mother. The retrial years later reopened that wound without changing the basic loss. The scene prosecutors described — a woman fleeing a home, trying to stop a police car, then being shot as the officer approached — has made the case stand out even in a county where violent crime cases regularly move through court. It fused private terror and public witness into one event. The officer saw part of it. Neighbors likely heard the rest. A child was inside. And the legal system, after correcting what the Supreme Court said were major mistakes, still landed at the same conclusion.

Higgs now returns to state custody under a sentence designed to keep him imprisoned for the rest of his life, with parole eligibility far in the future. Unless new appeals alter the case again, the next clear milestone is any post-conviction challenge filed after the March 20, 2026 sentencing.

Author note: Last updated April 14, 2026.