In a revenge plot gone wrong, a teen who torched a house, killing an innocent family of five over a stolen iPhone, had his punishment dealt to him.
The leader of a teenage gang responsible for the deaths of two infants and three adults after targeting the wrong Colorado home has been sentenced to 60 years in prison.
Kevin Bui, who was 16 at the time of the incident, accepted a plea deal after admitting to setting the Denver home on fire where eight people were sleeping in August of 2020, according to The Daily Mail.
Bui and two other teens broke into the Green Valley Ranch home and doused the walls with gasoline before torching it and fleeing the scene.
Three family members were able to jump to safety from a second-story window, but the bodies of Djibril Diol, his wife Adja, 23, their 21-month-old daughter, Khadija, along with Diol's sister Hassan and her six-month-old daughter, Hawa, were found nestled together by the front door.
"It's not like the closure I imagined, but I guess it's the best we could get," family friend Ousman Ba told The Daily Mail.
Bui and his two accomplices, Gavin Seymour, 16, and Dillon Siebert, 14, had spent weeks organizing the attack on the home.
Equipped with hockey masks from a costume store, the teens were caught on surveillance making their way to the house loaded with cans of gasoline.
Denver police officer Gordon King was one of the first to arrive on the scene and heard someone struggling to unlock the door from inside using a keypad.
"Officer King kicked in the front door but was forced away from the door by the extreme heat," according to the arrest warrant.
It went on to reveal King spotted a small human body approximately three feet inside of the front door, and as he attempted to get the person out, he quickly realized the person was not alive before he was forced back by the extreme heat of the fire.
Investigators had little information until Google was ordered to submit information on anyone who had searched online for the Truckee Street address in the two weeks prior to the blaze.
The gang of teens was then placed at the scene through cell phone location data.
Bui had wrongly identified it after using the 'Find My iPhone' app to track the location of his stolen device in the family's neighborhood.
All three boys were arrested in January 2021 and charged with crimes including first-degree murder with extreme indifference, attempted murder with extreme indifference, burglary, and assault with a deadly weapon.
While Siebert was sentenced to 10 years behind bars for his role, Seymour pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and received a jail sentence of 40 years.
Bui's lawyers announced a deal with the Denver District Attorney's Office on Friday in which he accepted the 60-year prison sentence in exchange for the DA dropping an additional 60 criminal charges.
Following sentencing, Hanady Dio, who lost his son Djibrril and daughter Hassan, said he had contemplated killing himself several times after their deaths.
"This person here is talking about 40 or 30 years. That just means there is no justice there. There is no judging that the people who died are human beings.
I'm powerless. I'm unlearned, but know that the people you killed couldn't even kill a fly," he said.
