BUCKS COUNTY, PA – On Wednesday, a Bucks County jury sentenced Alfonso Sanchez to death for the 2007 killings of Lisa Diaz, 27, and Mendez Thomas, 22, inside a Warminster Township apartment. This marked the second time Sanchez was convicted and sentenced to death for the murders, having previously been granted a retrial in 2017.
In the retrial, which began last week before Common Pleas Judge Alan M. Rubenstein, Sanchez was convicted on two counts of first-degree murder and related offenses. He was also found guilty of solicitation to commit murder in a plot to kill a woman who survived the 2007 rampage in the Bucks Landing apartments.
During the penalty phase, prosecutors presented aggravating factors that justified Sanchez’s death sentence for Diaz’s first-degree murder, such as committing the killings while in the perpetration of a felony and knowingly creating a grave risk of death to others.
Sanchez will be formally sentenced to death for the murder of Diaz, life for the murder of Thomas, and additional sentences for soliciting three others to have the living witness against him killed. District Attorney Matt Weintraub expressed satisfaction with the jury’s decision, stating, “I’m ecstatic that I could bring this to a close for the family after they waited patiently for 16 years.”
The murders occurred on the night of October 16, 2007, when Sanchez and two other men, Steven Miranda and Alex Martinez, went to Thomas’s apartment under the pretense of buying marijuana
. After completing the transaction, Sanchez shot Thomas and Diaz following a verbal altercation. The living witness was also shot but survived. Sanchez’s 2008 conviction was overturned due to undisclosed DNA lab reports, and a retrial was granted in 2017.
