Steffen Vadoria Tidwell Jr. received eight to 20 years in prison after a jury convicted him of voluntary manslaughter in the shooting death of Jomar Almestica.
LANCASTER, Pa. — A Lancaster County judge sentenced Steffen Vadoria Tidwell Jr. to eight to 20 years in state prison after prosecutors said he shot and killed an uninvolved bystander during a tense argument outside a family barbecue in 2021.
The sentence closed the main trial phase of a case that stretched from a summer shooting on Hebrank Street to a jury verdict in October 2025 and sentencing on March 26, 2026. Tidwell, 31, was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and a summary firearms count in the death of 26-year-old Jomar Almestica, a father of three who prosecutors said had not been part of the dispute that led to the shooting. In addition to prison time, the court ordered Tidwell to pay more than $8,000 in restitution.
Prosecutors said the shooting happened shortly after 10 p.m. on Aug. 20, 2021, in the 600 block of Hebrank Street in Lancaster city. What began as a family barbecue, Assistant District Attorney Jessica Collo told the court, turned into “a scene of death.” Authorities said Tidwell, who lived on North Queen Street in Lancaster, got into a heated argument at the gathering, walked to his car, retrieved a handgun and came back armed. He then fired five shots. Almestica was on the front steps of a nearby home and was not involved in the argument, according to the district attorney’s office and local police reporting. He was struck by the gunfire, rushed to a hospital and died a little more than an hour later. Early police reports said officers were called to the block just after 10 p.m. and found Almestica suffering from multiple gunshot wounds.
The case moved slowly through the court system before reaching a jury in 2025. In October, jurors convicted Tidwell of voluntary manslaughter after deliberating for two days, according to local coverage of the verdict. That outcome meant the jury did not convict him on the most severe homicide charge initially filed after the shooting, but it still left him facing years in state prison for firing the shots that killed Almestica. At sentencing, prosecutors described the shooting as a needless escalation. Collo said, “There’s no reason why this should have happened,” and argued that Tidwell had made the moment deadly by bringing a gun into an argument that had already turned tense. “He escalated the situation,” she told the court. “There’s no doubt of that.” Lancaster City Bureau of Police Officer Austin Krause filed the charges in the case.
The victim’s family gave the hearing much of its emotional weight. In a letter read aloud in court, Almestica’s mother described the “great pain and emptiness” left by her son’s death. She called him “a good, humble and simple boy” who loved fishing and giving gifts to his children. Another relative described him as someone who “brought joy into people’s lives.” The family’s words gave the court a fuller picture of a man whose name had otherwise appeared mostly in charging papers and trial coverage. Almestica’s obituary, published after the killing, said he was born in Puerto Rico, was living in York and loved spending time with his children, watching movies and fishing with his father. At sentencing, the family returned to the same point in more direct terms: the children he left behind now must grow up without him. One relative summed it up by telling the court that Almestica “was a father who mattered.”
Tidwell also addressed the court before Judge Dennis Reinaker imposed sentence. According to the district attorney’s office, he apologized to Almestica’s family, asked for forgiveness and said he was ready to be held accountable for what he had done. He told the court he was “in no way proud” of his actions and said he had changed during the roughly four and a half years he spent in jail while the case moved toward trial and sentencing. He said he hoped to rehabilitate himself by the end of his prison term. Prosecutors pushed back on that argument. Collo told the judge that whatever progress Tidwell claimed to have made, that progress would never have been tested in jail if he had not shot Almestica in the first place. “What is justice if the price of one man’s progress is another man’s life?” she said. She also pointed to Tidwell’s criminal history, which she said included convictions for violent crimes and felony firearms offenses.
The sentence itself reflected both the limits of the jury’s verdict and the seriousness the court attached to the killing. Reinaker ordered a prison term of eight to 20 years, meaning Tidwell must serve at least eight years before he can be considered for parole and could remain locked up for as long as 20 years under the sentence imposed. The court also ordered him to pay more than $8,000 in restitution. Public reporting after the hearing said Tidwell remained in Lancaster County Prison. No new hearing date was announced in the coverage that followed the sentencing. That leaves the March 26 hearing as the latest major milestone in a case that began with a neighborhood shooting and ended, for now, with a state prison sentence and a courtroom record shaped by trial testimony, victim impact statements and the judge’s ruling.
The setting of the crime has remained central to how prosecutors describe it. This was not a robbery, a break-in or an ambush on a deserted street. It was a gathering outside a home, in a residential block, where people had come together for food and company. That backdrop sharpened the sense of loss in court because the violence broke into an ordinary social event and struck someone who, by the prosecution’s account, was not even part of the confrontation. Law enforcement accounts consistently described Almestica as an innocent bystander. The district attorney’s office said he was sitting on the steps of a nearby residence when Tidwell shot him. The family, in turn, centered the hearing not on the argument that triggered the gunfire but on the life that was cut short afterward. Their comments pulled the story back from legal categories and returned it to the basic fact that three children lost their father over a dispute that was not his own.
For now, Tidwell’s conviction and sentence stand, and the case has moved from trial to the longer prison term that follows. The next milestone would likely come only if an appeal is filed or a parole review date is eventually set years from now.
Author note: Last updated March 29, 2026.