A Lehigh County judge sentenced Evander Thompson to life without parole for the 2023 murder of Orlando Ibanez.

A life sentence after a first-degree murder conviction is the mandatory Pennsylvania judgment on that count. It is not a finding on any other case. Thompson's July verdict settled guilt for Ibanez's killing. Wednesday's hearing imposed life without parole on murder and a consecutive firearms term. The Missouri matter the DA mentioned is still an open investigation with no charges filed. An accusation elsewhere does not add years to this judgment, and it does not reopen the Allentown verdict.

Evander Thompson, 32, of Allentown, Pennsylvania, was sentenced Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2026, to life in prison without parole for first-degree murder in the Sept. 23, 2023, shooting death of Orlando Ibanez, the Lehigh County District Attorney's Office said in a release covered by The Morning Call, WFMZ, and NBC10 Philadelphia. He also received three to seven years for carrying a firearm without a license. A jury convicted him of both counts on July 30, 2026.

According to the DA's account summarized by those outlets, Allentown police responded just before 2 a.m. on Sept. 23, 2023, to a shooting on the second floor of an apartment building on West Allen Street and found Ibanez, then reported as 58 or 61, dead of a gunshot wound to the neck at his apartment entrance. Coroner Daniel Buglio ruled the death a homicide. City surveillance captured a man later identified as Thompson entering the building shortly before the shooting and running away minutes later. Video also showed him using a cellphone afterward; prosecutors said he texted another person "he dead." Investigators recovered a gun that the county firearm lab matched to a shell casing at the scene and the projectile from the autopsy, and they said analysts found a social-media video of Thompson holding a gun consistent with that weapon. Those were the State's trial facts. The July conviction is the jury's finding.

At sentencing, the DA's office also said Thompson is a person of interest in the 2016 killing of a teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, and that no one has been charged in that open investigation. Relatives of that victim attended Wednesday's hearing, reporting said. Being named a person of interest is not a charge and not a conviction. It does not change the Allentown life sentence.

All defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Thompson was presumed innocent through the Allentown trial; the July verdict and Wednesday's life sentence are the judgment on Ibanez's murder. Any separate Missouri inquiry remains an accusation unless and until charges are filed and proved.