DeSantis signs death warrant for Casselberry murder conviction
Ron DeSantis signed a death warrant for William Frances Silvia, whose 2006 killing of Patricia Silvia at her Casselberry-area home returned to the calendar for Aug. 18.
Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a death warrant Friday for William Frances Silvia, whose case stems from the 2006 killing of Patricia Silvia at her mother’s home in the Casselberry area. The warrant sets Silvia’s execution for Aug. 18, 2026, and a Florida death-penalty tracker said it is the 13th death warrant DeSantis has signed this year.
Silvia was convicted in Seminole County of first-degree murder in the Sept. 22, 2006, shooting death of his estranged wife, along with attempted first-degree murder in the same incident. Court records place the case under Seminole County case number 2006-CF-4522-A, and the killing remains tied to a specific local address and a family home that sits at the center of the crime’s history in Casselberry.
The Florida Supreme Court upheld Silvia’s conviction and death sentence on April 7, 2011, in Silvia v. State, 60 So. 3d 959. In a later 2013 decision, the court said Silvia, then a prisoner under sentence of death, waived his postconviction proceedings and counsel after a June 26, 2012 hearing, when the trial court found no reasonable grounds to believe he was mentally incompetent for that hearing.
That sequence matters because it shows how long the case has moved through Florida’s courts before reaching a new execution date nearly two decades after Patricia Silvia was killed. The warrant brings renewed attention to a Seminole County case that has already been through trial, direct appeal and postconviction litigation, while leaving Patricia Silvia’s family and the Casselberry community with another hard milestone in a case that has never faded from the county’s legal record.
Florida’s death-penalty machinery has accelerated again in 2026, with DeSantis issuing multiple warrants across the state. In Silvia’s case, the new warrant means the long-running capital case is no longer only a historical file in the Seminole County Circuit Court or an opinion in the Florida Supreme Court archives. It now has a date attached, and Casselberry is once again the place where that case began.
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