It’s late May now.

When the calendar brings me to this time every year, I recall my Piscataway High School’s junior prom day on May 20, 55 years ago. I was a sophomore then and I did not attend the formal dance, but it would be later that evening that I would have an unfortunate compassion for those who did.

On the Friday afternoon of the prom in 1967, at a side street in Plainfield, New Jersey, a 26-year-old history teacher from my school shot six bullets into the body of my 22-year-old Spanish teacher, killing her instantly. Police found two other bullets inside the upholstery of her red convertible sports car.

She was expected to be a chaperone at the prom that evening. My junior class friends told me how quickly the dance had ended when the news came to them by way of another chaperone who arrived in total hysteria. Within seconds, teachers paced the dance floor in disbelief, girls’ tears washed their makeup down their faces, and the boys huddled together in shock. I was home when I got the call. When the reality hit me, I went into my bedroom to be alone with my thoughts.

The back story to this horrific tragedy was known to most everyone in our school. The two had been dating and often seen walking together in the halls. He was an assistant football coach and a very popular teacher. She was my favorite teacher of a subject I liked the least of all. We were a rowdy class, but we knew when to stop because she tried so hard to teach us first year Spanish. She called on me that very afternoon in May, about four hours from her death, to see if I was grasping the conjugation of pronouns in Spanish.

“Ricardo, lo entiendes?” (Do you understand?), she asked.

“No,” I answered with a laugh. “No entiendo.” She cocked her head like a puppy and went through the whole conjugation again. She had this smile that invited my attention. She never gave up on me even when I wanted to give up trying to learn the language she taught.

The account of her murder reached the New York media and was the lead story on the 6 o’clock news. The following day, the front-page headline of the Daily News read “Teacher Slain” with a picture of her underneath the big black words. Details of the crime were publicized. He had asked her to drive him to Plainfield to pick up his car that was being repaired. An argument ensued and apparently, she wanted to break up with him. After he gunned her down, he ran from her car into a department store. A bystander who had heard the shots followed his tracks and called the police. He was apprehended without further incident.

After spending the weekend with some of my stunned friends, I had zero interest in returning to school on Monday morning. I went anyway. As I sat in homeroom waiting for the bell to send us to first period, our principal addressed everyone over the loudspeaker.

“What happened on Friday was a terrible tragedy for all of us here at our school. But life and our academic responsibilities must go on. Have a good day.”

That was it.

There was no grief counseling like you would have today. We were basically told to get over it. When I walked into my Spanish class that afternoon, there was a new teacher sitting at the desk.

“Please sit down everyone,” she said. “Take out your ALM books and open to the chapter where you left off and we will start our lesson from there.”

And that was that.

At a recent high school reunion, a friend told me that he had after-school detention with the history teacher that Friday and when he walked into the classroom to serve his punishment, the teacher was standing behind his desk with an open briefcase in front of him. When he noticed my friend, he slammed the brief case shut and said, “I have something to do now so why don’t you come back Monday to serve your detention.”

My friend believed that the gun was in the briefcase and if he had only seen it, he could have told someone.

The history teacher was found guilty of premeditated murder and was sentenced to 25 to 30 years. He was paroled after serving just eight of them. Today, at the age of 81, he is living in northern New Jersey.

I have held him in prison in my mind for much longer than his sentence, 55 years to be exact. During my youth, I lived through the assassinations of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy, but none had affected me personally as much as the murder of my Spanish teacher. Somebody once said, “You don’t get over the loss of someone that mattered to you. You get through it.”

She was an inspiration for me to become a teacher. I used Mary Jo, her first name, for one of the main characters in the novel I wrote. I suppose I may be overly sentimental about all this, but to know someone whose life was ended at the blossom of her adulthood was disturbing to me then and still is. To have had the good fortune to live as long as I have makes me wonder why some of us get the privilege of our senior years while others leave this world before they could experience the joys that come with the longevity of a life lived.

Two years after her murder, I attended my high school senior prom. I remember taking a shot of whiskey from a flask that a friend had sneaked into the dance. We knocked one back in a toast for Mary Jo.

She came and left in a blink of an eye. Every year at this time of the month of May, I can still hear her voice asking me that question.

“Ricardo, lo entiendes?”

“No, entiendo,” I answer her, “and I never will.”

Rich Strack can be reached at richiesadie11@gmail.com.