Video After The Jump
One by one, members of Colorado’s Senegalese community arrived in Green Valley Ranch. They came from down the street, across town and as far as away as the mountains, carrying water and folding chairs. They hugged, they talked quietly, they wept as fire investigators walked through the scorched rubble that once housed a young family.
And despite the oppressive Denver sun, the community would not budge.
They came to support their brother, their friend, their community after an overnight house fire killed Djibril Diol, his wife, daughter, sister and niece. Denver police opened a homicide investigation, saying there was evidence the 2:40 a.m. Wednesday fire was intentionally set. Three other residents managed to jump from the second story and survived without life-threatening injuries, fire officials said.
But community members on Wednesday were left with a question nobody could answer: Why?
“What would our community do to be a target?” Ousman Ba said.
The fire was reported after a Denver police officer in the area noticed smoke, and neighbors started calling 911.
Police were first on scene and tried to save people, but the flames and heat were too intense, said Capt. Greg Pixley, spokesman for the Denver Fire Department.
“Officers quickly determined there were people in the home,” Joe Montoya, chief of the Denver Police Department’s investigations division, said at a morning news conference. “There was a valiant effort to try to pull people from the home. They were unable to save some of the individuals that perished in the fire.”
Diol and his family immigrated from Senegal in recent years, and they were staying at the 5312 N. Truckee St. home with another family until they could find their own, Ba said. That’s what this community does, he said. They look out for one another.
Source: Denver Post
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