FIND MY MURDERERS

Three teens almost got away with a shocking crime. Then police decided to test the limits of Google.

- by Raksha Vasudevan

Amadou Sow woke to the shrieking of smoke detectors. It was alittle after 2:30 am on August 5, 2020, and his house in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado, was ablaze. The 46-year-old rushed to his bedroom door, but a column of smoke and heat forced him back. Panicked, Sow ran to the rear window, broke the screen with his hand, and jumped. The two-story drop fractured his left foot.

Sow’s wife Hawa Ka woke their daughter Adama, who shared their room. She dragged the terrified 10-year-old to the window and pushed her out. Sow tried to catch her but missed. Miraculously, the girl landed on her hands and feet, uninjured. Then it was Ka’s turn. When she leaped, she fell on her back, shattering her spine in two places. Sow barely heard her howls of pain. He was thinking about their 22-year-old son, Oumar.

He couldn’t see any movement inside Oumar’s room. He hurled a rock at the window, but the glass held steady. Despair filled him. Then he noticed Oumar’s car wasn’t in the driveway. He must be working his night shift at 7-Eleven. Thank God! Sow’s family was safe. But what about the others in the house? All told, nine people called 5312 Truckee Street home.

Sow had bought the four-bedroom property in the northeastern suburb of Green Valley Ranch in 2018. The neighborhood was newly built and sparsely populated, cut off from the bulk of the city by miles of prairie grass, giving it an isolated, ghost-town feel. But for Sow, a Senegalese immigrant who usually worked nights at Walmart, the home was a refuge. Not long after his family moved in, his old friend Djibril Diol’s family joined them. Diol—Djiby to his friends—was 29 and a towering 6'8", a civil engineer who hoped to one day take his skills back to Senegal.