An Ohio nail salon owner who tried to bomb her competitor’s establishment in a feud was sentenced to 46 months in prison on Thursday.
Salon owner Kim Lien Vu, 46, of Liberty Township, Ohio, had already pleaded guilty last fall to conspiring to commit malicious destruction via fire, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Ohio noted.
Vu not only tried to bomb her nail nemesis but also recruited two other women, who are also charged, to help her burn down the Bora Bora Nail Salon, in a strip mall shopping center in Monroe full of restaurants and businesses.
Vu owned Allure Nails Vu LLC and Love Nail Vu LLC, also in Monroe, about 30 miles north of Cincinnati.
Vu “developed animosity towards individuals at a competing nail salon and, beginning in December 2022, approached her employee about a plot to exact revenge on the competing salon,” the Ohio attorney’s office said in its statement.
Vu allegedly talked employee Cierra Bishop, 30, into helping her set the competing salon on fire. Bishop got to work designing a “remote-controlled incendiary device that could start a fire within a small box,” the DOJ said, and the two women texted back and forth about the plot they dubbed Job 1. What wasn’t enshrined in texts was caught on surveillance video.
In February 2023 they were ready to roll, with the help of a friend of Bishop’s, 19-year-old Makahla Rennick, who had made a pedicure appointment under the name Katelynn. The goal was to get the latest appointment available and be accompanied by Bishop.
“Just use another name. Sound white,” Vu instructed her, according to text messages cited by the justice department.
While Vu traveled to a Virginia property she owned so as to have an alibi, Bishop and Rennick went to the salon. As Rennick got her toenails painted, Bishop wandered around looking for a place to plant the device and stashed it under a desk in the back of the salon, near the restroom.
An employee found the package, redolent of gasoline, and opened it. Seeing it looked like some kind of explosive device, she threw it in the dumpster out back. She later went to look at it and saw it was igniting, and called in a dumpster fire.
All three women were indicted in February 2023, with Bishop also pleading guilty and both co-defendants awaiting sentencing, the DOJ said.
