Kevin Bui sentenced to 60 years in prison for killing Senegalese family in Colorado house fire over iPhone theft

The family that owned the house managed to escape, but all members of the two related families renting it from them were killed – 29-year-old Djibril Diol, his 23-year-old wife Adja Diol and their 22-month-old daughter Khadija, as well as Djibril Diol’s sister, 25-year-old Hassan Diol and her 7-month-old daughter Hawa.

Hamady Diol, the father of Djibril and Hassan Diol, spoke by telephone from Senegal during his sentencing hearing about needing sleeping pills after losing five family members.

“I am a dead man who has not been buried yet,” he said in Pulaar through an interpreter.

The victims’ bodies were found on the first floor of the home, near the front door, apparently trying to escape the flames. One of the homeowners who managed to escape heard Djibril Diol shouting to get people out of the house. He was an engineer who worked on a major reconstruction of Interstate 70 in Denver and was well-liked for helping other immigrants.

Adja Diol and her sister-in-law, Hassan Diol, worked opposite shifts at Amazon so they could care for each other’s children and continue to send support to their families in Senegal. They dreamed of going to school to become nurses.

At the time of the fire, Hassan Diol’s husband, Amadou Beye, was in Senegal waiting for a visa that would allow him to join his wife and meet their child, who was born in the United States.

In court, Beye called Bui a “big terrorist” who did not deserve to eat, sleep or talk to his family in prison. Beye, who was allowed to move to the U.S. after the fire, said he tries to avoid being alone when he is not working so he doesn’t think about his loss. He said he wears a pendant with God’s name on it as a reminder not to hurt himself.

“We can’t be normal because of you,” he said, addressing Bui, even though Judge Karen L. Brody urged him to address her.

Bui, who listened to the hearing while sitting with his lawyers, did not appear to show any reaction to statements by Beye or the other speakers during the hearing.

When he was able to speak, Bui said he was an “ignorant fool” at the time of the fire. He said he couldn’t fathom what it was like to have your family members ripped away from you and listed the names of all the victims.

But he rejected the idea that he was a monster or a terrorist and instead said, “My heart beats the same as yours.”

“I have no excuses and no one to blame but myself,” he said.

One of Bui’s lawyers, Rachel Lanzen, told Brody that his involvement in the fire was unusual for a young man who is polite and respectful and was raised by hard-working Vietnamese immigrants. She said Bui did not set the fire himself, placing the blame on the youngest of three accused friends. Police denied that, saying Bui confessed to starting the fire and was burned in the process.

Bui, who prosecutors say was the ringleader of the scheme, told investigators he was robbed of his phone, money and shoes while trying to buy a gun before deciding to set the fire, according to previous testimony. At the time, he was helping his older sister, Tanya Bui, deliver drugs, according to federal court documents. The sister’s enterprise was accidentally discovered when police searched the family’s suburban Denver home as part of an investigation into the fire.

Assistant District Attorney Courtney Johnston emphasized the vindictiveness of Bui’s plan and said it wasn’t just about getting the phone back. Bui, seeming to know what was at stake, sent a text message to one of his friends days before the fire, talking about the possibility of destroying their future by burning down the house, she noted.

After his arrest, he only expressed regret that he had targeted the wrong people, killing immigrants as well as his relatives, not that he had set the fire, she said.

“He was trying to get revenge on the person who he felt took his phone and he didn’t care who else he took,” Johnston said. She said the crime had “torn a hole” in the city’s Senegalese immigrant community.

In May, after failing to challenge key evidence in the case, Bui pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder. Sixty other charges Bui faced, including first-degree murder, were dropped by prosecutors, who recommended Bui be sentenced to 60 years in prison.

Relatives reluctantly supported the deal, seeing it as the best way to end the long-running criminal case.

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 prisoners. In March, Gavin Seymour, 19, was sentenced to 40 years in prison after pleading guilty to one count of second-degree murder.

Surveillance footage showed three suspects wearing face masks and dark hoodies standing outside the house just before the fire broke out. But the investigation dragged on for months, and no other leads were found.

Amid fears that the fire was a hate crime, some Senegalese immigrants installed security cameras in their homes in case they, too, were targeted. The homeowner’s son, who worked the night shift at a 7-Eleven when the fire broke out, was also a suspect until Bui and his friends were identified and arrested.

Police didn’t believe the house, hidden among dozens of others on the street in a densely built-up neighborhood, had been chosen at random. They tried a new and controversial strategy: asking Google to reveal which IP addresses had searched for the home in the 15 days since the fire. Five of those were in Colorado, and police obtained the names of those individuals through a subsequent search warrant, ultimately identifying Bui, Seymour and Siebert as suspects.

In October, the Colorado Supreme Court upheld Google’s searches of users’ keyword histories, an approach that critics have called a digital manhunt that threatens to undermine people’s privacy and constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. The court cautioned that it was not making a “sweeping proclamation” on the constitutionality of such search warrants and emphasized that it was ruling on the facts of this one case.