Samuel Lopez-Ordones pleaded guilty to third-degree murder after prosecutors said he tracked Daniela Allende and stabbed her at her family’s home.
READING, Pa. — A Berks County man has been sentenced to 20 to 40 years in state prison after pleading guilty in the January 2025 stabbing death of his former girlfriend, Daniela Allende, inside a home on the 1200 block of Amity Street, according to published court reporting and police accounts.
The sentence closes a case that began as a first-degree murder prosecution and ended with a negotiated plea to third-degree murder. Prosecutors said the killing followed a breakup, a week of growing jealousy and the use of a GPS tracker placed on Allende’s vehicle. The case drew attention because investigators said Lopez-Ordones later told police he stabbed Allende “as a joke,” even though the wound to her chest proved fatal. The immediate stakes shifted from whether prosecutors would seek a trial on the original charges to how much prison time the plea would carry.
Authorities said Samuel Lopez-Ordones and Allende had been in a relationship for about 10 years before it ended in January 2025. After the breakup, Allende told him to move out of the Amity Street home where they had lived with their children and members of her family. Investigators said he left, but only for a short time. In the days that followed, prosecutors said, he became angry over the separation, argued with Allende about seeing their children and secretly placed a GPS tracking device on her vehicle. On Jan. 29, 2025, police and later court reporting said, he used that device to follow her to a restaurant parking lot, where he saw her with another man. Roughly 45 minutes later, when Allende returned home, Lopez-Ordones followed her back to the house. There, according to investigators, he confronted her and demanded to know who the man was. When she told him to stop, the encounter turned deadly.
Police said officers were called to the home at about 8:50 p.m. on Jan. 29 and found Allende, 27, with a fatal stab wound to the chest. She died at the scene. Investigators said Lopez-Ordones later told police he saw a knife nearby, picked it up and stabbed her, then claimed he had done it “as a joke” and did not realize until afterward how deeply she had been wounded. According to the account reported from court documents, he then went upstairs and told Allende’s sister that he had “did something bad” and had hurt her sister. The sister went downstairs and found Allende on the kitchen floor in a pool of blood, authorities said. Family members, including Allende’s father and brother, held Lopez-Ordones on a sofa until officers arrived. Early police reporting identified him as 33 at the time of arrest. He was later reported as 34 at sentencing, reflecting the passage of time between the killing and the plea.
The case carried both the familiar features of a domestic killing and several details that sharpened prosecutors’ theory of motive. Investigators said the attack came just days after the breakup and after Lopez-Ordones had begun tracking Allende’s movements. That sequence gave the prosecution a clearer chronology: separation, surveillance, confrontation and then the stabbing itself. Police initially treated the case as a homicide tied to a domestic dispute, and prosecutors filed charges that included first-degree murder, aggravated assault and related counts. Those charges signaled that the commonwealth was prepared to argue the killing was intentional and serious enough to support the most severe homicide count short of a death-penalty case. At the same time, the later plea to third-degree murder showed the case resolved without a trial, avoiding testimony from family members who were in the house that night and would likely have been central witnesses if the matter had gone before a jury.
Allende’s death also left a deep family loss that was reflected in the public record outside the courtroom. Her obituary described her as fiercely independent and full of life, a woman who made her own way in the world. It said she was born June 12, 1997, in Guanajuato, Mexico, and remembered in Reading by relatives and loved ones after her death on Jan. 29, 2025. A memorial fundraiser created the next day described her as kind, patient and understanding and said she was the mother of two young girls. Those details did not decide the legal case, but they helped frame what was taken from the family in a matter of minutes. They also gave the killing a place in the wider record of homicides in Berks County in 2025, when county officials later reported 15 homicides, 12 of them in Reading. Allende’s case was not left unsolved. Police had a suspect at the scene, family witnesses inside the house and an alleged statement by the defendant that became one of the most striking details in the file.
By the time of the February 2026 sentencing reports, Lopez-Ordones had pleaded guilty to third-degree murder and received 20 to 40 years in state prison, which published accounts described as the maximum possible sentence for that offense. The plea meant the original first-degree murder and aggravated assault charges were dismissed as part of the deal. He had been held in Berks County Correctional Facility since Jan. 30, 2025, the day after the stabbing. Public court portals, as noted in reporting at the time, did not yet fully reflect the plea and sentencing update, a reminder that online dockets can lag behind courtroom events. No separate trial date was needed after the plea. The next practical step was his continued incarceration under the state sentence, with any post-sentence motions or appeal rights governed by Pennsylvania procedure. No public report available at the time indicated that an appeal had been filed. What remained clear was the final outcome in the trial court: a guilty plea, a decades-long sentence and the formal end of a prosecution that began with the highest-level murder charge.
Even in the bare facts of police and court accounts, the scene inside the house remained stark. A woman had returned home after going out, relatives were nearby, and a confrontation that may have lasted only moments turned into a killing. The prosecution’s case did not rest on a complicated chain of forensic evidence alone. It rested on the physical scene, the witnesses inside the home, the earlier tracking of Allende’s movements and the defendant’s own words after the stabbing. Reading police said the attack happened in the evening inside a family residence, not in some hidden place but in a home where others were present and able to act. That detail mattered because it showed how quickly the violence unfolded and how many people were immediately drawn into its aftermath. It also explains why family recollections and first responder accounts likely shaped the case from the start. The result, after more than a year in custody, was not a courtroom fight over identity or location. It was a negotiated end to a case built around jealousy, surveillance and a fatal chest wound that prosecutors said followed a breakup none of the adults in that home could stop.
The case now stands with Lopez-Ordones sentenced and Allende’s killing counted among Reading’s resolved homicides from 2025. The next milestone, based on public reporting, is any update that appears in the online court docket or any notice of an appeal.
Author note: Last updated March 15, 2026.