ALLENTOWN, Pa. – A man convicted of killing his friend will spend up to two decades behind bars for the crime.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Cruz was convicted by a jury in December 2025 of voluntary manslaughter.<\/p>\n
The victim was shot and killed on April 26, 2018, in the 300 block of Linden Street, Allentown.<\/p>\n
Arriving officers found Sanchez suffering from two gunshot wounds. He underwent emergency surgery but later died and his death was ruled a homicide.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Cruz will serve his Pennsylvania state prison sentence consecutively to the sentence in Massachusetts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ALLENTOWN, Pa. – A man convicted of killing his friend will spend up to two decades behind bars…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":135801,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[119,121,120,62665,1218,62664,28],"class_list":["post-135800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-allentown","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-headlines","tag-allentown-news","tag-anderson-cruz","tag-gavin-holihan","tag-juan-sanchez","tag-pennsylvania"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135800","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=135800"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135800\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/135801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}