A third and final suspect pleaded guilty to murder Friday for his role in starting the house fire that killed five members of a Senegalese family in Denver’s Green Valley Ranch neighborhood nearly four years ago.
Kevin Bui, 20, agreed to serve 60 years in prison as part of his agreement to plead guilty to two counts of second-degree murder, though he will not be sentenced until July 2.
Sixty other counts against Bui were dismissed as part of the deal with prosecutors, as was a second, separate case in which he was accused of bringing drugs into jail in June 2022.
“Guilty,” Bui responded when asked how he pleaded. He wore a jail uniform and sat handcuffed with his defense attorneys. His parents watched the hearing from a few feet away, listening with the help of a Vietnamese interpreter.
Bui could have faced as many as 48 years in prison on each second-degree murder count.
Bui was 16 when he set the Aug. 5, 2020, fire that killed two children and three adult relatives in a home on Truckee Street. He and two other teenagers — Gavin Seymour and Dillon Siebert — intentionally set the family’s house on fire in the middle of the night because Bui mistakenly thought someone who had stolen his phone lived in the house. The trio set the house on fire as revenge, court testimony has shown.
Djibril Diol, 29; his wife Adja Diol, 23; and their daughter Khadija Diol, 1, died in the blaze, along with Djibril’s sister, Hassan Diol, 25; and her 6-month-old daughter Hawa Baye. Dijibril tried to lead his wife and daughter out of the inferno, making it to a set of stairs near the door before they collapsed.
Bui is the last of the teenagers to plead guilty. Siebert, who was 14 at the time, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in 2022 and was sentenced to three years in juvenile detention followed by seven years in prison. Seymour, who was 16, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in January and was sentenced to 40 years in prison.
After the hearing, a man who declined to give his name but was identified in court as Bui’s father, Thuan Bui, spoke briefly with reporters.
“We accept it,” he said of the guilty plea. He added that he and his wife would likely not return to court for the July sentencing.
The teenagers planned the fire for weeks and then tried to cover their tracks after the killings, searching online for information on the fire and about the prison sentence for murder. They were caught on ghostly surveillance video wearing masks and dark sweatshirts during the attack, which for weeks was investigators’ only lead in the case.
Investigators tied the teens to the killings by using a controversial search warrant that required Google to turn over any users worldwide who searched particular keywords in a particular time frame. In this case, Denver police compelled Google to turn over information about anyone who had searched the address of the Truckee Street home during the 15 days leading up to the fire.
The cases against Seymour and Bui were stalled for several months while the Colorado Supreme Court considered the legality of that search warrant. The justicesupheld the warrant in October, allowing the cases against the teenagers to move forward.
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