In 2020, a man from Colorado thought he was getting back at the people who stole his iPhone by setting a house on fire in Denver. He went after the wrong house, though.
Last week, he admitted that he killed a family living there who had nothing to do with the crime.
The Denver DA’s office said in a post on X that Kevin Bui, 20, pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder on Friday.
Bui was charged as an adult even though he was only 16 years old at the time of the fire on August 5, 2020.
A police report for Bui’s arrest said that his iPhone was stolen during a drug deal.
Police said in the statement that Bui planned to burn down the house of the people who robbed him.
NBC News said that testimony in the trial showed that Bui had used an app to find his lost iPhone.
An statement from the police said that they think Bui set fire to the wrong property and instead burned down the home of a Senegalese immigrant family.
There were five deaths in the fire, including a child 21 months old and a baby 6 months old.
NBC News said that as part of a plea deal, 60 other charges against Bui were dropped. These included first-degree murder and setting fires.
The district attorney’s office in Denver said he could spend 60 years in jail. His sentencing is set for July 2.
And finally, Bui is the last of three people to plead guilty to the fire.
Dillon Siebert took a plea deal and admitted to second-degree murder. He was given a sentence of three years in youth detention and seven years in a state prison program for young inmates last year.
News from The Denver Post said that Gavin Seymour got 40 years in jail after pleading guilty to second-degree murder in March.
Last year, the Washington Post said that apps like Find My can be very accurate, but they’re not always accurate.
In Denver in 2022, a SWAT team searched the wrong house of a 77-year-old woman while looking for a truck that had stolen guns and an iPhone in it.
An attorney for the woman told The Washington Post that the police used the Find My app, which took them to the wrong home.
A jury gave the woman $3.76 million in March for the botched raid.
