Amadou Beye never met his infant daughter before she died in a Green Valley Ranch home set ablaze by masked arsonists.

Beye was in Senegal when his daughter was born and planned to rejoin his family in Denver.

But 6-month-old Hawa Beye died in the 2020 fire along with her mother, 25-year-old Hassan Diol. The baby only ever heard her father’s voice over Facetime.

Three members of another family perished inside the home as well: Djibril Diol, 29; Adja Diol, 23; and Khadija Diol, 2.

“I am dead, with my wife, with my daughter,” Amadou Beye told a Denver District Court judge at a Wednesday sentencing hearing for one of the three teen suspects. “I have nothing anymore.”

Dillon Siebert, 17, was sentenced Wednesday to three years in the Division of Youth Services and seven years in the Department of Corrections’ Youthful Offender System for his part in the deadly arson that destroyed multiple families and stoked fear in the entire Senegalese community in Denver.

He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in December — the only one of the three teen suspects to plead guilty to setting the fire in 2020.

Siebert was 14 at the time of the fire and originally was charged as a juvenile with 47 criminal counts, including first-degree murder, attempted murder, first- and second-degree assault, first- and fourth-degree arson, and first and second-degree burglary.

Siebert’s age at the time of the fire and his lesser involvement in the planning and execution of the crime were some of the factors prosecutors weighed when negotiating the plea deal, Deputy District Attorney Courtney Johnston said in court.

Siebert apologized to the victims’ families in a statement he read before he was sentenced.

“I pray to them all the time asking them to forgive me,” he said of the victims.

Members of the victims’ families left the courtroom while Siebert spoke. No words he could say or sentence handed down by the court could restore their loved ones, they said later.

“They’re not coming back,” said Abou Diol, who is the brother of Djibril. “Our life is destroyed.”

The plea deal

The criminal cases against the two other teen suspects — Gavin Seymour and Kevin Bui, who both were charged as adults — are on hold until May, when the Colorado Supreme Court is expected to review the constitutionality of a search warrant that was critical to identifying them as suspects.

The three teens set the Green Valley Ranch home on fire on Aug. 5, 2020, because Bui erroneously thought a person who stole his phone lived there and he wanted revenge, law enforcement officers said during a November 2021 court hearing.

The teens bought masks to wear to hide their faces and splashed gasoline inside of the home before lighting it on fire, law enforcement officials testified.

Of the three teens, Siebert had the least involvement in the planning of the fire, Johnston said. Bui was the person who physically set the house ablaze, she said.

Siebert was struggling with alcohol use and depression at the time of the crime and used friends as a social crutch, his defense attorney Johnna Stuart said in court. He has behaved well in juvenile detention since his arrest in January 2021 and is a good candidate for successful rehabilitation and reintegration into society, she said.

“There is nothing that I can say today, there is nothing that Dillon can say today, to make the families whole — to justify what happened,” Stuart said.

Siebert was charged in juvenile court because he was younger than 16 years old at the time of the crime. Prosecutors could have sought a hearing to ask a judge to move the case to adult court, but instead opted to negotiate for a plea deal and avoid the risk of the case remaining in juvenile court, Johnston said.

The deal allowed for a sentence harsher than what was possible in juvenile court, but still far less severe than sentences possible in adult court, she said.

Both Beye and Diol were disappointed by the 10-year sentence.

“I don’t care if they put them in jail for 20 years, for the rest of their lives, we will never forgive them,” Diol said.

American dreams crushed

Denver’s Senegalese community lived in fear for months between the August 2020 fire and the arrests of the three teens nearly six months later.

They worried that the victims of the fire had been targeted because they were immigrants, or because they were Black, or because they were Muslim — or some combination thereof, said Amadou Dieng, a friend of Djibril Diol and a leader of the Senegalese community in Denver.

The community still does not feel safe even after the arson was found to be motivated by petty vengeance, he said.

“Every Senegalese house in Green Valley Ranch now has cameras because we cannot sleep in peace,” Dieng said.

Many of the families came to the U.S. to seek stability, work and education — they wanted the American Dream, he said.

“But you cannot pursue a dream if you cannot sleep in peace,” Dieng said.

Djibril Diol was one of those people seeking his American Dream, said Ousman Ba, one of Diol’s friends.  He got a degree and a job. He assimilated into the culture and he learned the language. He believed in the process, Ba said.

Diol studied for a degree in mechanical engineering and was working on the Interstate 70 expansion program, Ba said. Diol’s dream was to return home to Senegal with his family, build roads there and give back to his country.

“All we do is we work, we pray and we go to sleep,” Diol’s brother said. “We never harmed anybody.”

Beye’s dreams also died on Aug. 5, 2020. He’s not sure if he’ll ever want to re-marry or have another child. He lives as a dead man walking, he said. In court on Wednesday, he wore a sweatshirt featuring a photo of his wife and daughter and a single question on the back: “Why my family?”

“She was my everything,” Beye said of his wife. “She was the most perfect woman I knew in this world. You took her away from me, forever.

“Everything I had in the United States, they took it away from me.”

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