Singapore/Pattaya: The father of Thai teenager Thanchanok Donhomla has come face to face for the first time with the Australian accused of her murder, sitting just metres away in court as Simon Peter Carman again insisted the girl had come at him with a knife.
“I feel angry, and got angrier listening to Simon denying the charges, not admitting to the crime, even daring to claim self-defence, saying he was threatened,” Tongchai Donhomla said outside the court in Pattaya, Thailand. “I want to punch him.”
The family is seeking the death penalty and, in a separate civil claim, about $70,000 in compensation.
Carman, 45, previously pleaded not guilty to intentional murder and two charges related to indecent acts with a minor, but on Monday pleaded guilty to concealing a body.
Donhomla was accompanied inside the small and crowded courtroom by his sister, Miruntree Thanachai, while other family members waited outside.
They had travelled close to 600 kilometres from their town of Ban Bo, in the north-east province of Kalasin. “We want to see [his] face,” Thanachai said as they arrived.
Carman arrived from Pattaya’s remand prison, dressed in brown and shackled at the ankles and wrists.
He is accused of murdering Thanchanok, known as “Cake” to those close to her, in the early hours of June 25 at his condominium on the outskirts of coastal Pattaya, about 150 kilometres south of Bangkok, before allegedly stuffing her body inside a suitcase and dumping it in long grass near a railway line.
At his first court appearance last month, he pleaded not guilty to all charges, including concealing her body.
But the judge on Monday successfully advised him through a translator to change his plea on concealing the body because of the plethora of evidence on that point.
Security footage at the condominium captured Carman and Thanchanok arriving hand in hand at about 3.30am. Hours later, Carman is seen wheeling out a suitcase alone, travelling on a motorbike with the suitcase attached, and returning without it.
The judge also advised Carman to plead guilty to murder and later argue self-defence, but he declined. He says he feared for his own life when she produced the knife.
He claims he never had sex with the teenager, and only reluctantly let her accompany him home from the beach, where she had been hanging out with two friends.
When Thanchanok was about to leave, Carman says she asked for money. He offered 500 baht ($21) but she demanded more and grabbed a knife from the kitchen, he claims. He says she died in an ensuing struggle, and in his panic, he decided to hide her body.
Carman, a long-term Thailand resident, was arrested at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport on June 27, shortly before he was to board a flight back to Australia.
Thanchanok had been in Pattaya for only a few days before her death. Her family says she was not a sex worker and went there on a holiday to see friends and the beach.
Pattaya Police Colonel Anek Srathongyoo said the autopsy showed she had died by asphyxiation and an internal brain injury. He previously said no injuries were found on her body, but the court heard on Monday that she had a broken jaw.
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