by a jury in December 2025 for the killing of his friend, 24-year-old Juan Alfredo Sanchez<\/a>. Cruz was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter, unreasonable belief, which is a first-degree felony.<\/p>\nLehigh County Judge Robert L. Steinberg on Wednesday gave Cruz the maximum sentence of 10-20 years in state prison, according to a news release from District Attorney Gavin Holihan.<\/p>\n
Cruz killed Sanchez on April 26, 2018, in the 300 block of Linden Street.<\/p>\n
According to authorities\u2019 investigation, Cruz and Sanchez were in a car together, and got into both a verbal and physical argument. During the argument, Cruz pulled a handgun from below the seat of his vehicle and shot Sanchez twice before driving away at high speed.<\/p>\n
According to authorities, officers found Sanchez in the street suffering from two gunshot wounds to his torso. Sanchez underwent emergency surgery, but died from his injuries. His death was ruled a homicide by the Lehigh County coroner.<\/p>\n
Cruz did not call police or EMS after the shooting. Instead, he went to get his hair cut, authorities said.<\/p>\n
Authorities issued a warrant for Cruz the day after the killing, but he gave away the gun he used to shoot Sanchez, sold his car and fled to Massachusetts.<\/p>\n
Cruz committed a second homicide two months after arriving in Massachusetts, and in 2019 was arrested by federal authorities in a heroin and fentanyl trafficking investigation. He pleaded guilty to the drug investigation charges and homicide, and was sentenced to 70 months in prison for the drug trafficking charges.<\/p>\n
He was returned to Pennsylvania in 2024 to be tried for Sanchez\u2019s death.<\/p>\n
Steinberg ordered Cruz to serve his state prison sentence consecutively to the sentence he received in Massachusetts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A man convicted of a 2018 killing in Allentown will serve up to 20 years in state prison.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":56519,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[119,153,155,154,46,433,182,139,28,432],"class_list":["post-135789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bethlehem","tag-allentown","tag-bethlehem","tag-bethlehem-headlines","tag-bethlehem-news","tag-courts","tag-lehigh-county","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-pennsylvania","tag-top-stories-tmc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135789","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135789"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135789\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}