DENVER (AP) — A Colorado man was sentenced to 60 years in prison Tuesday for starting a house fire that killed five members of a Senegalese family, a crime which the victims’ friends and family say has forever changed their lives and their community, both in the U.S. and in the west African nation.
Kevin Bui, now 20, was the last of three teens charged in the 2020 fire to be sentenced after pleading guilty to reduced charges in a plea deal. Authorities say Bui, who had recently been robbed, mistakenly thought he had tracked down his stolen iPhone and carefully plotted his retribution. But he neglected to make sure he was targeting the actual thief.
Instead, sleeping inside the home were members of three immigrant families who were working to support their families back home and had nothing to do with the robbery. They were Djibril Diol, 29; his 23-year-old wife, Adja Diol; and their 22-month-old daughter, Khadija, as well as Djibril Diol's sister, Hassan Diol, 25, and her 7-month-old daughter, Hawa.
Hamady Diol, the father of Djibril and Hassan Diol, spoke during the sentencing hearing by phone from Senegal about how he needs pills to sleep after losing five members of his family.
“I'm a dead person that's not buried yet,” he said in Pulaar through a translator.
The bodies of the victims were found on the first floor of the home near the front door as they apparently tried to escape the flames. Members of another family that also lived in the home managed to escape.
Bui, wearing a green jail uniform with his wrists shackled to a chain around his waist, said he was an “ignorant knucklehead” at the time of the fire. He said he could not fathom what it would be like to have family members ripped from you, reciting the names of all the victims.
But he pushed back on the idea that he was a monster or a terrorist, as some victims have called him, and instead said, “My heart beats the same as yours.”
“I have no excuses and nobody to blame but myself,” he said.
When he was killed, Djibril Diol was working on a large rebuilding of Interstate 70 in Denver and dreamed about returning to Senegal to build roads there.
Hassan Diol's husband, Amadou Beye was still in Senegal awaiting permission to come join his wife and meet his infant daughter for the first time when the fire happened. He was granted an emergency visa after the fire, works as a mover and tries to avoid being alone in the evenings to keep from thinking about what he has lost. With his roommate working nights as an Uber driver, he goes to the gym or calls family and friends late at night back home.
"I just don’t want to be thinking about that when I’m alone,” Beye said before the court hearing.
Prosecutors have portrayed Bui as the ringleader of the group that started the fire. The son of immigrants from Vietnam, he had been helping his older sister, Tanya Bui, deliver drugs she was dealing around the time of the Aug. 5, 2020, fire, according to federal court documents. The sister's enterprise was accidentally discovered when police searched their family's suburban Denver home as part of the fire investigation, and she is currently serving a nearly 11-year federal prison sentence.
After being arrested in connection with the fire, Bui told investigators he had been robbed of his phone, money and shoes while trying to buy a gun, according to court testimony from the case's lead detective, Neil Baker. Using an app to track his phone, Bui said he learned it was at the home and believed the people who robbed him lived there, though he did not research the home’s residents, Baker said at a hearing on the evidence in the case in 2021.
Bui admitted to setting the fire, only to realize the next day through news coverage that the victims were not the ones who robbed him, according to Baker. Investigators never said where Bui’s phone actually was.
In May, after a failed effort to challenge key evidence in the case, Bui pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder. Sixty other charges Bui had faced, including first-degree murder, attempted murder, arson and burglary, were dropped by prosecutors, who recommended that Bui be sentenced to 60 years in prison.
If Judge Karen L. Brody rejects the proposed deal, both sides would have to either work out another deal or go to trial.
Relatives largely support the deal, not because they view it as true justice, but because they see it as the best way to resolve the criminal case nearly four years after the fire.
Beye, who is Muslim, said he hopes God will provide justice some day. But, after nearly four years, the relatives left behind are tired and want the last of the criminal cases resolved, he said.
“We just want to move forward because we’re going to have to live with this for the rest of our lives,” Beye said.
Last year, Dillon Siebert, who was 14 at the time of the fire, was sentenced to three years in juvenile detention and seven years in a state prison program for young inmates. In March, Gavin Seymour, 19, was sentenced to 40 years in prison after pleading guilty to one count of second-degree murder.
Surveillance video showed three suspects wearing full face masks and dark hoodies outside the home just before the fire started, but the investigation dragged on for months without any other leads. Amid fears that the fire had been a hate crime, some Senegalese immigrants installed security cameras at their homes in case they could also be targeted.
Police did not believe the home, tucked in among many similar ones on a street in a dense subdivision, was picked at random. They tried a new and controversial strategy — asking Google to reveal which IP addresses had searched for the home's address within 15 days of the fire. Five of them were in Colorado, and police obtained the names of those people through another search warrant, eventually identifying Bui, Seymour and Siebert as suspects.
In October, the Colorado Supreme Court upheld the search of Google users’ keyword history, an approach critics have called a digital dragnet that threatens to undermine people’s privacy and their constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. The court cautioned it was not making a “broad proclamation” on the constitutionality of such search warrants and emphasized it was ruling on the facts of just this one case.
Colleen Slevin, The Associated Press
