The Denver District Attorney s Office has announced that Kevin Bui and Gavin Seymour, a pair of sixteen-year-olds arrested last week in the arson deaths of five people in August 2020, will be charged as adults, but a third, fifteen-year-old suspect is set for prosecution in the juvenile system.
These decisions demonstrate how DAs try to balance public demands for justice in heinous cases involving underage individuals against the recognition that those accused of committing the crimes are technically still children. Similar dynamics came into play in the cases of at least fifteen other teens charged as adults for murders that took place in Colorado dating back to the early 1990s.