Diana May sits in a Redwood City courtroom each day, watching Alberto Alvarez, the man accused of killing her husband, and listening to witnesses fill in the missing pieces of the story.

“We don’t know exactly what happened,” said May, who lives in Orcutt but attends every court session in San Mateo County.

“The only people who know exactly what happened were Alberto Alvarez and my husband,” she said.

After Alvarez testified Thursday, May said, “It’s unfortunate that he’s able to tell his side of the story and Rich isn’t alive to tell us what happened.”

Her husband, Rich May, 38, a former Lompoc police officer and father of three daughters, was gunned down Jan. 7, 2006, after he answered a disturbance call and pursued a suspect on foot.

He had transferred to the East Palo Alto Police Department only 18 months earlier, and he and his family were still living in Orcutt.

Alvarez, 28, is charged with first-degree murder, with the special circumstance that May was a police officer performing his duties. If convicted, Alvarez could face the death penalty.

Prosecutors rested their portion of the case last week, and defense attorneys began presenting their witnesses Thursday. First up, unexpectedly, was Alvarez himself; he claimed that he shot at the officer because he feared for his life.

Diana May has listened carefully to every bit of testimony — from the Police Explorer who was riding with her husband the day he was killed, and from the fellow officer who tried to revive him. She heard testimony from investigators, and from the physician who performed the autopsy.

She heard from the witness stand that her husband was shot four times and was killed by a bullet that struck him in the face.

“Some of it’s hard to hear,” said May. “I just want to know what his last few minutes were.”

The couple met in 1993. She was a credit-union loan officer in Orcutt and he wanted to buy  a car.

“I saw him with his little girl, and he was just a real good dad, I could tell that,” she said.

“He came in quite a few times. He had a good sense of humor. He joked that he couldn’t afford to buy any more cars, so he’d better ask me out.”

On their first date, they ate dinner at an Italian restaurant in Santa Maria. He brought his 18-month-old daughter, Deanna, and she brought her 5-year-old daughter, Brittany.

Afterward, they went to his house and watched Disney movies.

“It was just so Rich,” she said, recalling that he knew all the words to the Disney songs and sang them with the girls.

“He loved the movies just as much as they did — sometimes more, I think,” she said. “He was a really good dad.”

They married in June 1995, and Lauren was born in March the following year.

The Mays didn’t talk much about the dangers of police work, but Diana said she knew that her husband wanted to get back out on the streets.

“As the wife of a police officer, you can ‘t think every day when he goes to work it might be his last. You would drive yourself crazy,” she said. “I didn’t do that.”

The couple did talk about his love of teaching and his dedication to helping youngsters. While in Lompoc, he helped found the Police Activities League and taught anti-drug classes to fifth-graders.

May also taught a criminal-justice class at Lompoc High School. One of his students, Ramiro Oceguera, was looking toward graduation after struggling as a student and having no interest in college.

“May told me there were opportunities in law enforcement. He told me he had joined the Marine Corps and then went into law enforcement,” Oceguera recalled.

“I joined the Marine Corps, and it helped me out a lot,” said Oceguera, 28, who now has a master’s degree and is a probation officer for Santa Barbara County. “It really was the catalyst that changed my life.”

Oceguera said May was a powerful motivator.

“There was something about him, that I didn’t feel like I was talking to an adult. He really came down to my level,” he said. “He was really approachable and accessible, and he was genuine.”

May attended Oceguera’s graduation from basic training in San Diego, and wrote him letters while the young Marine was deployed to Iraq.

“He was just a great guy, phenomenal,” Oceguera recalled.

When Diana May returned home with her daughters on Jan. 7, 2006, there was a phone message from her sister-in-law. There had been an “officer-involved shooting” in East Palo Alto, but there were no details.

May didn’t panic. She remembered another shooting in East Palo Alto, in August 2005. A vehicle was being towed and the owner opened fire on the tow-truck driver, who was standing next to Officer Rich May.

“I kept calling his cell phone and couldn’t get hold of him. He had left his cell phone in his patrol car. I called the department and he was fine,” she said. “That was my first thought the night he was killed.”

This time, she called his cell phone again and couldn’t reach him.

Less than an hour later, two Santa Barbara County sheriff’s deputies knocked on her door.

“I said, ‘I know why you’re here,’ and they said, ‘You do?’’’

She stepped outside and closed the door behind her.

“I knew he had been shot, but I didn’t know if he were dead or alive,” she said. “I asked them where he had been shot and whether he was alive or dead, and they had to tell me.”

After her husband was killed, May promised herself that she would be in court every time his accused killer was.

“I felt like I need to be there to represent my husband. I feel like he (Alvarez) is sitting there alive and breathing and we have to be there to represent Rich.”

One of the witnesses May listened to was an expert for the prosecution, who testified that May’s actions on the day he was killed were appropriate under police guidelines.

“I knew he did everything right,” May said. “The only thing different he could have done, instead of pulling out his (baton), he could have pulled out his gun. He didn’t do that because he wasn’t aware this person had a gun.

“Basically, he gave this guy the benefit of the doubt. Rich didn’t have to continue to chase him the way he did. He could have let him go. If he had done that, we don’t know who else down the road he would have killed.

“For me, hearing this, it’s hard for me, but I still need to know, as best I can, exactly what happened to him, so I can understand better.”

But understanding what happened to her husband in the moments before he was killed won’t bring the nightmare to an end, she said.

“A lot of people think this will bring closure — I don’t know if there ever will be closure,” she said. “I don’t even know what closure is. I don’t know.”

The family has survived the shock of his death and the numbness, and is coping with the anger and facing the reality that Rich is gone, she said.

“We’re finally starting to feel our new normal,” she said. “We’re never going to be the same as we were. We’re never going to be the same people because he’s not here.”