ALLENTOWN, Pa. – A man convicted of killing his friend will spend up to two decades behind bars for the crime.
Lehigh County District Attorney Gavin Holihan announced that 28-year-old Anderson Cruz was sentenced today to 10 to 20 years in state prison for the 2018 shooting death of 24-year-old Juan Sanchez.
Cruz was convicted by a jury in December 2025 of voluntary manslaughter.
The victim was shot and killed on April 26, 2018, in the 300 block of Linden Street, Allentown.
Arriving officers found Sanchez suffering from two gunshot wounds. He underwent emergency surgery but later died and his death was ruled a homicide.
Investigators discovered that both Cruz and Sanchez were in a car together and got into a verbal argument that escalated into a physical fight. During the fight, Cruz pulled out a handgun and shot the victim twice before driving away at a high rate of speed.
After the shooting, Cruz gave away the weapon used in the killing, sold his car and fled to Massachusetts. Two months after arriving in Massachusetts, Jorge Cruz committed a second homicide and in 2019, he was arrested by federal authorities in a heroin and fentanyl trafficking investigation.
He pleaded guilty in both the federal drug investigation and the Massachusetts killing and was eventually returned to Pennsylvania in 2024 for the homicide case.
Cruz will serve his Pennsylvania state prison sentence consecutively to the sentence in Massachusetts.