Nearby: Philly Man Sentenced to Death for 2007 Bucks Landing Killings

Last week a Bucks County jury sentenced Alfonso Sanchez to death on Wednesday, May 3, 2023, for the killings of a man and woman inside a Warminster Township apartment in October 2007.

It marked the second time Sanchez was convicted and sentenced to death for the 2007 murders of Lisa Diaz, 27, and Mendez Thomas, 22. After he was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to death in 2008 for the killings, Sanchez appealed his decision, and the Bucks County District Attorney’s Office agreed to grant him 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.

The family of the victims gave heart-wrenching testimony on Tuesday, the first day of the penalty phase.

During the penalty phase, prosecutors presented aggravating factors that justified that Sanchez should be sentenced to death for the first-degree murder of Diaz. Among those factors, Sanchez committed the killings while in the perpetration of a felony and he knowingly created a grave risk of death to others.

Sanchez will be formally sentenced to death for the murder of Diaz, and to life for the murder of Thomas by Rubenstein at a later date. He will also be sentenced at that time for soliciting three others to have the living witness against him killed.

“I’m ecstatic that I could bring this to a close for the family after they waited patiently for 16 years,” District Attorney Matt Weintraub said following the jury’s decision. “It was a terrible ordeal for them to go through it again, but we feel vindicated that the jury rendered the verdict that they rendered.”

On the night of Oct. 16, 2007, Sanchez and two other men – Steven Miranda and Alex Martinez – went to Thomas’s apartment under the ruse that they wanted to buy marijuana from him.

When the three men arrived, Lisa Diaz was inside watching her sister’s two young children. Her sister and Thomas, her sister’s boyfriend, were at a neighbor’s house at the time and arrived minutes later.

After they had completed the marijuana transaction inside the apartment, Thomas and Sanchez got into a verbal altercation when one of them stepped on the other’s shoe.

During the altercation, Sanchez followed Thomas into the hallway of the apartment and shot him in the head. He then turned the gun on Diaz, shooting her multiple times, including once to her head.

Sanchez then fired the gun at Diaz’s sister, who was able to grab her son and ball him up in her arms in a protective fetal position, shielding him from gunfire. She was shot in the knee.

In 2008, Sanchez was found guilty of first-degree murder and was sentenced to death, but in 2017, he was granted a new trial after it was discovered that DNA lab reports were not turned over to his attorneys during the initial trial.

While awaiting the new trial, Sanchez tried to finish what he started in 2007 and ordered the killing of the surviving witness. Bucks County Detectives thwarted his plot.

In a chilling 911 call played during the trial and again during closing arguments, the surviving victim can be heard telling dispatchers that she knows who shot her, her sister, and her boyfriend: “His name’s Alfonso,” she said.

This case was investigated by Detectives with the Bucks County District Attorney’s Office and the Warminster Township Police Department, with assistance from Horsham Township Police Department, Detectives with the Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office, and the U.S. Marshals Service, and was prosecuted by District Attorney Matthew Weintraub, Chief Deputy District Attorney Matthew Lannetti and Deputy District Attorney Edward Furman Jr.