A Colorado man was sentenced to 60 years in prison for setting a house fire that killed a family of five Senegalese immigrants in a robbery revenge plot gone wrong.
Kevin Bui, now 20 and the alleged ringleader of the scheme, pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder in a plea deal. Sixty other charges, including first-degree murder, were dropped by prosecutors as part of the deal.
Bui told investigators he was robbed the month before the fire while he was attempting to purchase a gun. He said he traced his iPhone to the home using an app, according to court records. He admitted to setting the fire and said he found out the next day through news reports that the victims were not the people who robbed him, police said.
The fire was an apparent revenge plot for the stolen cellphone mistakenly traced to the home.
Bui’s lawyer said he did not set the fire himself, pinning the blame on the youngest of the group of three friends charged in the case. Police disputed that, saying Bui confessed to starting it himself and was burned in the process, according to The Associated Press.
Bui is the last defendant to be sentenced in the case.
Gavin Seymour, now 19 years old, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 40 years in prison. Dillon Siebert, 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.
“If I could go back and prevent all this, I would,” Seymour previously said. “There is not a moment that goes by that I don’t feel extreme guilt and remorse for my actions. … I want to say how truly sorry I am to the family members and community for all the harm I’ve done.”
Surveillance video showed three suspects wearing full face masks and dark hoodies outside the home just before the fire started Aug. 5, 2020.
Police used a controversial strategy, asking Google to reveal which IP addresses had searched for the home’s address within 15 days of the fire. Eventually, they were able to identify 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 search and seizure. 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 this one case.