Samuel Lopez-Ordones pleaded guilty in the January 2025 killing of Daniela Allende in Reading after prosecutors said he tracked her and confronted her at home.
READING, Pa. — A Pennsylvania man was sentenced to 20 to 40 years in prison after pleading guilty to third-degree murder in the fatal stabbing of his former girlfriend, Daniela Allende, in a Reading home days after she ended their relationship and told him to move out.
The sentence closes the main criminal case in a killing that prosecutors said grew out of jealousy, surveillance and a confrontation inside the home Allende shared with relatives and children. Lopez-Ordones, 34, had originally faced a first-degree murder charge and other counts, but the case ended in a negotiated plea to third-degree murder. The punishment matched the maximum term available for that offense, marking a severe outcome even without a trial on the original charge.
Authorities said Lopez-Ordones and Allende had been in a relationship for about 10 years before it unraveled in January 2025. After the breakup, Allende told him to leave the home on the 1200 block of Amity Street, where they had been living with their children and members of her family. Investigators said he moved out but did not let go of the relationship. In the days that followed, he argued with Allende about seeing the children and secretly placed a GPS tracker on her vehicle, according to court accounts described in local reporting. On Jan. 29, 2025, he used that information to follow her to a restaurant parking lot, where he saw her with another man. About 45 minutes later, authorities said, he followed her back home. There, he confronted her and demanded to know, “Who was that guy?” After she told him to “just stop,” investigators said, the encounter turned deadly.
Police said Lopez-Ordones later told investigators he noticed a knife near him, picked it up and stabbed Allende “as a joke,” then claimed he did not realize until afterward that he had stabbed her deeply in the chest. Prosecutors treated that statement not as an excuse, but as part of the record in a homicide that ended with a young woman dying on her kitchen floor. After the stabbing, investigators said, Lopez-Ordones went upstairs and told Allende’s sister that he had “did something bad and hurt your sister.” The sister went downstairs and found Allende in a pool of blood, according to authorities. She called 911. Allende’s father and brother then restrained Lopez-Ordones on a sofa until officers arrived. Lopez-Ordones was taken into custody and has remained jailed in Berks County since Jan. 30, 2025. Public court information available after the sentencing did not immediately reflect the full plea and sentence entries, but reports on the hearing said the prison term had been imposed.
The case drew attention because of how quickly the violence escalated after the breakup and because the allegations described conduct that went beyond a sudden argument. Investigators said Lopez-Ordones had tracked Allende’s movements before the killing, a detail that prosecutors could use to show anger and fixation in the days leading up to the attack. The original charging decision reflected that seriousness: first-degree murder, aggravated assault and related offenses were filed before the plea deal changed the course of the case. The negotiated plea avoided a trial and the need for relatives to relive the killing in open court, but it also meant the case ended without a jury deciding whether the evidence supported premeditated murder. What remains clear in the public account is that Allende, 27, had tried to separate her life from Lopez-Ordones after years together and that the confrontation happened in the home where her family was present. The result was immediate and permanent, leaving children, siblings and parents at the center of the loss.
Beyond the courtroom, the public picture of Allende came through the people she left behind. Her obituary remembered her as someone who made her own way in the world, with a relaxed personality and a habit of laughing and joking. That description stood in painful contrast to the final moments described by investigators. The setting was not an isolated street or a late-night bar, but a family home where relatives were close enough to hear the aftermath and rush in. The fact that family members physically held the defendant until police arrived added another layer of trauma to an already violent scene. The case also underscored how domestic killings can unfold in ordinary places with little warning to the people nearby, even when a relationship has formally ended and one person has moved out. In Reading, the address on Amity Street became both a crime scene and the site of a family emergency in which loved ones tried, in real time, to save Allende and stop the man accused of killing her.
Legally, the next steps are narrower now. With the guilty plea entered and the 20- to 40-year sentence imposed, the case has moved from prosecution to long-term incarceration unless post-sentence motions or an appeal are filed. Third-degree murder in Pennsylvania does not require proof of the specific intent to kill that first-degree murder does, and the plea resolved that question without a full trial. The sentence means Lopez-Ordones will face a long minimum term before any parole consideration and could remain in prison for decades. The earlier first-degree murder and aggravated assault counts were dismissed as part of the agreement, according to the public reporting on the plea. No separate public announcement described an upcoming hearing after sentencing, and online court records available at the time did not yet show the final updates from the case. For Allende’s family, that leaves no major courtroom milestone immediately ahead, only the administrative process that follows sentencing and the longer passage of time that often begins once the legal fight is over.
The human details, however, continue to define the story more than the procedural ones. Allende was 27. Lopez-Ordones was 34. They had shared roughly a decade together and were raising children before the relationship ended. The final confrontation began, investigators said, with a question about another man and ended with a fatal chest wound. The words described in court records and follow-up reporting were brief, but they carried enormous weight. Police said Lopez-Ordones asked, “Who was that guy?” and that Allende answered, “just stop.” After the stabbing, his reported statement to her sister — that he had done “something bad” — became one of the case’s starkest details. Another came from the obituary, which described Allende as cheerful and lighthearted, someone who believed life should be lived with joy and humor. Those details did not change the sentence, but they helped frame who she was beyond the case caption and why the loss reached far past the courtroom. The prison term ended one chapter. It did not resolve the emptiness left behind in the home where the killing happened.
As of mid-March 2026, the case stood as a completed guilty-plea prosecution with Lopez-Ordones serving his state sentence. The next public milestone is likely to come only if court records are updated with post-sentence filings or if any appeal is lodged in the months ahead.
Author note: Last updated March 15, 2026.