Final person to plead guilty in Denver fire that killed 5 people from Senegal could get 60 years

DENVER — In between her shifts at Amazon, to earn money to send home to her relatives in Senegal — where they took turns working with her sister-in-law so they could care for each other’s children — Hassan Diol called her husband several times a day to talk.

Amadou Beye was still in Senegal, trying to get a visa to come to the United States. His wife, accompanied by their baby daughter, would also video chat every day. Amadou Beye couldn’t wait to meet his child and see his wife again.

But he never got that chance.

Diol and their daughter Hawa and three other family members died in a house fire in Denver in 2020. Authorities said the fire was started in the middle of the night by a group of teenagers as an act of revenge.

The last of the three suspects could be sentenced to 60 years in prison at a hearing on Tuesday after pleading guilty to lesser charges in a plea agreement.

Beye considers Kevin Bui, now 20, a “terrorist” because he took five members of one family, including his wife’s brother, Djibril Diol, who was an engineer, his wife Adja Diol and their 22-month-old daughter.

Their bodies were found on the first floor of the house, near the front door, while they were apparently trying to escape the flames. Members of another family who also lived in the house managed to escape.

When he was killed, Djibril Diol was working on a massive reconstruction of Interstate 70 in Denver and dreamed of returning to Senegal to build roads there, according to previous testimony from friends and family.

Beye, who received an emergency visa after the fire, works as a mover and tries not to be alone in the evenings so he doesn’t have to think about what he lost. With his roommate who works as an Uber driver at night, he goes to the gym late at night or calls family and friends back home.

“I just don’t want to think about that when I’m alone,” said Beye, who plans to speak at Bui’s sentencing hearing.

Prosecutors have portrayed Bui as the leader of the group that set the fire. The son of immigrants from Vietnam, he helped his older sister, Tanya Bui, deliver drugs that she was dealing around the time of the Aug. 5, 2020, fire, according to federal court documents. The sister’s business was discovered by accident 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 he was 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 testimony from the lead detective on the case, Neil Baker. Bui said he used an app to track his phone and found out it was in the house and believed the people who robbed him lived there, though he did not research the home’s occupants, Baker said during a 2021 evidentiary hearing in the case.

Bui admitted to setting the fire, but realized the next day from news reports that the victims were not the ones who had robbed him, Baker said. Investigators have never said where Bui’s phone actually was.

In May, after a failed attempt to challenge key evidence in the case, Bui pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder. Sixty other charges against Bui, including first-degree murder, attempted murder, arson and burglary, were dropped by prosecutors, who recommended Bui be sentenced to 60 years in prison.

If Judge Karen L. Brody rejects the proposed agreement, both parties must either reach another agreement or go to court.

Relatives largely support the deal, not because they see it as real 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 one day provide justice. But after nearly four years, the family members who remained behind are tired and want the last criminal cases to be solved, he said.

“We just want to move forward, because we will have to live with this for the rest of our lives,” said Beye.

Last year, Dillon Siebert, who was 14 at the time of the fire, was convicted to three years in juvenile detention and seven years in a state prison program for young prisoners. In March, Gavin Seymour, 19, was convicted to 40 years in prison after pleading guilty to second-degree murder.

Surveillance footage showed three suspects wearing full-face masks and dark hoodies outside the home just before the fire, but the investigation dragged on for months without any further leads. Amid fears the fire was a hate crime, some Senegalese immigrants installed security cameras outside their homes in case they, too, could be targeted.

Police didn’t believe the house, tucked away among many similar homes on a street in a densely populated neighborhood, had been chosen at random. They tried a novel and controversial strategy: They asked Google to reveal which IP addresses had searched for the house’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 affirmed searching google users keyword historyan approach that critics call a digital dragnet that threatens to undermine people’s privacy and their constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. The court cautioned that it was not making a “broad proclamation” on the constitutionality of such search warrants, emphasizing that it was ruling on the facts of just this one case.