On the night of March 21, 2015, Phoenix police were called to an apartment complex near 13th Avenue and Mountain View Road, where they found Hector Silvain, a Hispanic / Latino male from Phoenix, Arizona, whose exact age has not been publicly reported, lying in the street with multiple gunshot wounds. Officers responded to an emergency call around 9:45 p.m.
and discovered him critically injured outside the complex; he was rushed to a nearby hospital, but despite medical efforts he was pronounced dead a short time later.
In the aftermath of the shooting, detectives focused on the apartment complex where the incident occurred and quickly determined that Silvain lived there as a renter in one of the units. According to investigative summaries reported later, he had been staying in a bedroom within the apartment of another man and their arrangement was bound up with heroin use and distribution. Police accounts indicate that Silvain’s access to the room was connected to heroin he supplied, and that both he and his roommate were involved in using and selling the drug, suggesting an unstable living situation shaped by shared substance abuse and the economics of the local drug trade.
Investigators soon identified 40-year-old George Minter, the primary leaseholder of the apartment and Silvain’s roommate, as the suspect in the killing. Minter came to the attention of detectives during their initial canvass and interviews, and he ultimately admitted to shooting Silvain. Police reports state that he turned over a Kimber. 45-caliber pistol, believed to be the weapon used in the crime, when he spoke with investigators. Within days of the shooting, Minter was arrested and booked into the Maricopa County jail, where records list him as facing a charge of second-degree murder in connection with Silvain’s death. A contemporaneous court report notes that his bond was set at $1 million and describes him as a Phoenix man accused of fatally shooting his roommate the previous weekend, underscoring that authorities treated the case as a domestic homicide rooted in their shared household and drug-involved relationship.
The National Gun Violence Memorial records Silvain as having been lost to gun violence on March 21, 2015, in Phoenix, Arizona, and links his case to local news coverage describing the incident as a fatal shooting between roommates. Publicly available reporting centers solely on Minter as the alleged perpetrator; no additional suspects or arrests have been identified in open sources, and there is little detailed information about any subsequent court proceedings or about Silvain’s life beyond the circumstances of his death.
