Day: May 17, 2024

Give us 5 minutes, and we’ll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

(DENVER) — A Colorado man pleaded guilty to murder charges on Friday for starting a 2020 house fire that killed five members of a Senegalese family out of misplaced revenge for a stolen iPhone that he mistakenly tracked to the house.

Kevin Bui, now 20, was a teenager at the time of the fire but prosecuted as an adult. He has been portrayed by prosecutors as the ringleader of three friends who started the Aug. 5, 2020, fire in the middle of the night in a Denver neighborhood. Bui wrongly believed people who had recently robbed him lived in the home after using an app to track his stolen iPhone to the general area, according to prior testimony in the case.

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Bui pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder. A plea deal reached between the defendant and prosecutors proposes a sentence of up to 60 years in prison — 30 years for each count. The maximum penalty for each count of second-degree murder is 48 years and a $1 million fine.

Judge Karen Brody set sentencing for July 2.

Bui was seated at the table with his lawyers during the hearing with his hands cuffed in front of him and wearing a green jail uniform.

He gave perfunctory answers to the judge’s questions as his parents watched from the court gallery and listened to the proceedings as relayed by an interpreter through headphones. Bui’s father told reporters after the hearing that they accepted the plea agreement.

No relatives of the victims appeared to be present in court.

Bui is the last of the three friends to enter a plea in the fire that killed Djibril Diol, 29, and Adja Diol, 23, and their 22-month-old daughter, Khadija Diol. Their relative, Hassan Diol, 25, and her 6-month-old daughter Hawa Baye were also killed. Three other people escaped by jumping from the second floor of the home, breaking some bones.

One of the counts of second-murder that Bui pleaded guilty to was for killing Dijibril and Adja Diol and their child. The other is for killing Hassan Diol and her baby. Sixty other charges Bui had faced, including attempted murder, arson and burglary, were dropped by prosecutors under the plea deal.

Last year, Dillon Siebert, who was 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. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder under a deal that prosecutors and the defense said balanced his lesser role in planning the fire, his remorse and interest in rehabilitation with the horror of the crime.

In March, Gavin Seymour, 19, was sentenced to 40 years in prison after pleading guilty to one count of second-degree murder.

Seymour and Bui pleaded guilty after a failed effort to get the internet search history evidence that led to their arrests thrown out.

The investigation of the fire dragged on for months without any leads. Surveillance video showed three suspects wearing full face masks and dark hoodies. Fears that the blaze had been a hate crime led many Senegalese immigrants to install security cameras at their homes in case they could also be targeted.

Without anything else to go on, police eventually obtained a search warrant asking Google for which IP addresses had searched the home’s address within 15 days of the fire. Five of the IP addresses found were based in Colorado, and police obtained the names of those people through another search warrant. After investigating those people, police eventually identified Bui, Seymour and Siebert as suspects. They were arrested about five months after the fire.

In October, the Colorado Supreme Court upheld the search of Google users’ keyword history, an approach that critics have called a digital dragnet that threatens to undermine people’s privacy and their constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

However, the court cautioned it was not making a “broad proclamation” on the constitutionality of such warrants and emphasized it was ruling on the facts of just this case.

TORONTO (AP) — Canadian police announced Friday they have linked the deaths of four young women nearly 50 years ago to a now-deceased U.S. fugitive who hid in Canada from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s.

Alberta Royal Canadian Mounted Police Supt. Dave Hall said Friday that Gary Allen Srery might also be linked to unsolved murders and sexual assaults in Western Canada, and authorities are asking the public for more information that may link him to other unsolved cases.

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“We are now announcing that we have linked four previously unsolved homicides from the 1970s to a now deceased serial, sexual offender,” Hall said at a news conference in Edmonton, Alberta.

Srery died in 2011 in a state prison in Idaho of natural causes while serving a life sentence for sexual assault.

A break in the homicides in Canada came when authorities began comparing DNA of the killer with profiles on ancestry websites, which eventually lead them to a match with Srery, Hall said.

Hall provided details of the four Canadian cases linked to Srery.

He said that in 1976 Eva Dvorak and Patricia McQueen were both 14-year-olds living in Calgary, Alberta attending junior high. He said they were last seen walking together in downtown Calgary and that the following day their bodies were found laying on the road under a highway underpass west of the city.

In the spring of 1976, 20-year-old Melissa Rehorek moved to Calgary from Ontario for new opportunities, Hall said. He said at the time of her death she was a housekeeper living at the YMCA in downtown Calgary and was last seen by a roommate before she went hitchhiking. Hall said the following day her body was located in a ditch in a township west of Calgary.

In 1977, Barbara MacLean was a 19-year-old Calgary resident from Nova Scotia who moved west only six months earlier, Hall said. He said MacLean was working at a local bank and was last seen leaving a hotel bar. He said her body was found six hours later just outside Calgary.

Hall said authorities at the time didn’t come up with a cause of death for the two 14-year-olds but said Rehorek and MacLean’s deaths were attributed to strangulation.

Semen was collected from all four crime scenes but technology did not exist at the time to find DNA matches, Hall said.

“Were Srery alive today he would be 81 years old,” Hall said.

Alberta RCMP Insp. Breanne Brown said Srery had an extensive criminal record including forcible rape, kidnapping and burglary when he fled to Canada from California in 1974. He lived in Canada illegally until his arrest for sexual assault in New Westminster, British Columbia in 1998, she said.

Srery used nine different aliases in his lifetime and frequently changed his appearance, residence and vehicles, Brown said. She said he obtained illegal identification and social assistance though aliases and lived a transient lifestyle. He occasionally working as a cook in Calgary, Alberta from 1974 to 1979 and then in the area of Vancouver, British Columbia from 1979 until his arrest and conviction of sexual assault in New Westminster in 1998, she said.

Srery was deported to the U.S. in 2003 where he was convicted in Idaho for sexually motivated crimes and sentenced to life in prison, where he ultimately died in 2011, Brown said.

“We know that Srery’s criminality spanned decades over multiple jurisdictions and numerous aliases. The Alberta RCMP believe there are more victims and we are asking the public to assist in furthering Srery’s timeline in Canada,” Brown said.