The case returned to court after the New Jersey Supreme Court found errors in the first trial, including limits on cross-examining a police witness.
NEWARK, N.J. — Andre Higgs has again been sentenced to life in prison for the 2015 killing of his former girlfriend, Latrena May, after a retrial ordered by the New Jersey Supreme Court ended with a second murder conviction in Essex County.
What makes the case unusual now is not only the sentence but the path back to it. Higgs was first convicted and given life in 2017. Then the state’s highest court reversed the judgment in 2023 and sent the case back, finding multiple trial errors. Prosecutors retried the case, won another murder conviction on Dec. 23, 2025, and returned to court on March 20, 2026 for sentencing. The immediate consequence is that a prosecution once reopened by appellate review has closed, at least for now, with the same core outcome and a renewed life term tied to a killing that prosecutors say unfolded as May sought help from a police officer.
The appellate ruling shaped everything that followed. In State v. Andre Higgs, the New Jersey Supreme Court said defense lawyers should have been allowed access to East Orange Detective Kemon Lee’s internal affairs file and potentially to question him about prior incidents in which he fired his weapon on duty. The justices said that mattered because the defense argued Lee may have discharged his gun first during the 2015 encounter. The court also said another officer’s lay-opinion testimony about video evidence should not have been admitted and that Higgs’ remote prior convictions should not have been used the way they were at trial. The opinion did not declare Higgs innocent or reject the state’s account of May’s death. Instead, it said the process had been flawed enough that the verdict could not stand, forcing prosecutors to rebuild the case for a new jury.
When that second jury heard the evidence, it again found Higgs guilty. Essex County prosecutors said jurors convicted him 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 verdict on Dec. 23, 2025 restored the prosecution’s position nearly eight years after the first trial. It also set up a sentencing hearing before Superior Court Judge Ronald Wigler, who had presided over both the original proceedings and the retrial. On March 20, Wigler imposed life on the murder conviction, described publicly as a 75-year sentence, and added 20 years for related weapons counts. Prosecutors said New Jersey’s parole rules require Higgs to serve 85% of the murder term, nearly 64 years, before he can seek release.
Only after that legal path is clear does the underlying killing come into sharper focus. The shooting happened late on May 1, 2015 outside May’s home on Tremont Avenue in East Orange. Prosecutors said she had argued with Higgs, her former boyfriend, and ran from the home to escape him. As she flagged down a passing police vehicle, Lee stopped, got out and approached. That was the instant, prosecutors said, when Higgs fired multiple shots at May. Lee returned fire and hit Higgs in the legs. The defendant then retreated into the residence, where May’s 4-year-old daughter was asleep, and barricaded himself before officers arrested him. Those details have remained stable across the years even as the case moved through appeals, reversal and retrial.
The state has used strong language to describe both the violence and the people involved. Deputy Chief Assistant Prosecutor Justin Edwab said after the second conviction that witnesses had “once again” come forward to describe Higgs’ actions. He also repeated the office’s view of Lee as “a hero” for responding to May as she sought help. Essex County Prosecutor Theodore N. Stephens II announced the sentence in a March 20 release, offering the family a public sign that the office considered the case finally resolved in trial court. Yet some parts of the record remain thin in public summaries. Those releases do not detail every witness statement, every physical exhibit or every minute of the argument that led to the shooting. They establish the broad sequence, the legal counts and the penalties, but not the complete trial transcript.
The victim’s identity has carried particular weight in the coverage. May was 27 and worked as a teacher at Pride Academy Charter School in East Orange. Her obituary, published days after the killing, described services in Newark and a community gathering around a life cut short. Early television reports stressed that a small child had been left motherless. That community framing helps explain why the case did not fade even as the legal proceedings stretched over a decade. The retrial was not a new tragedy. It was a renewed examination of one that had already settled into local memory. By the time Higgs returned for sentencing this year, the case had become not just a murder prosecution but a test of whether an overturned conviction could be retried cleanly and still hold.
The scene itself still defines the story more than any later motion or opinion. May was outside her own home. She was trying to get an officer’s attention. The officer saw enough to stop. Gunfire followed anyway. That combination — a domestic violence attack spilling into the street in front of police — is why the case has continued to draw attention beyond a standard sentencing note. It compresses the limits of intervention into a few public seconds. For prosecutors, it also sharpened the moral argument at sentencing: May was at the point of asking for help when she was killed. For the defense, the retrial offered a chance to challenge the state’s handling of the evidence and the officer testimony the Supreme Court said had been unfairly shielded the first time. The second jury still convicted.
With the March 20, 2026 sentence now imposed, the trial-court phase is complete again. The next milestone will be any appeal or post-conviction filing that tests whether this second conviction remains in place.
Author note: Last updated April 14, 2026.