SOURCE :- THE AGE NEWS
Jomtien, Thailand: The family of the Thai teenager allegedly murdered by Australian Simon Peter Carman have taken her body home to the nation’s north-east following an autopsy in Bangkok that showed she died by strangulation.
Thanchanok Donhomla’s parents had travelled close to 600 kilometres from Kalasin province to the party city of Pattaya to be close to the investigation, speaking from outside the police station to call for the death sentence.
“I don’t know what else to say. I just want him executed,” her stepmother, Oradee Bussarakum, said.
A murder conviction in Thailand can carry the death penalty or a jail sentence of between 15 and 20 years. According to Amnesty International, Thailand handed down 119 capital sentences in 2025, including seven to foreign nationals.
No one, however, was executed during the year, the human rights body’s annual death penalty report said.
Carman is being held in prison at Pattaya, and no date has been set for his first court appearance.
Nong Cake, as she was known to people close to her, was a 17-year-old only child who “sometimes helped her father and me by selling garlands or fruits at intersections on the road during [Thai New Year],” Oradee told the ABC.
“She was still young, so sometimes we let her go out and gave her 50 to 100 baht ($2.20 to $4.40).”
Her father, Thongchai Donhomla, told Thailand’s TMN Cable TV Pattaya that he and Thanchanok’s mother had divorced when she was two years old. “Whenever she wanted anything, she would find a way herself, and she always helped me too. She never bothered me,” he said.
Police Colonel Anek Srathongyoo said he believed she had travelled alone from Kalasin to spend time with two local friends, a young man and a transgender woman.
Thanchanok had been in the area for only a week when she met Carman about 3am near the beach at Jomtien, a relatively quiet neighbourhood about 20 minutes by car south of Pattaya.
A phone video shot by one of her friends showed them walking slowly, hand-in-hand, towards Carman’s unit at the Rimhad Jomtien, a multi-tower condominium complex, where he had lived for about eight months.
About 18 hours later, Carman was captured by CCTV cameras wheeling out a suitcase allegedly containing Thanchanok’s body – and returning to the complex without it.
Her friends filed a missing persons report the following day, and within hours, authorities intercepted Carman at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport just minutes before he was to board a flight to Australia.
By tracking Carman’s movements from and to his unit on street CCTV cameras, police knew roughly where he had allegedly disposed of the body. But the footage did not capture a two-kilometre stretch of road, so 10 officers spent three hours searching the long grass by the railway tracks. Hours after Carman was detained, they found the suitcase with Thanchanok’s body, along with her clothes, phone, vape and receipts jammed inside.
Srathongyoo said Carman initially denied responsibility but changed his story when presented with the CCTV footage. He then allegedly told investigators the girl had come at him with a knife in a fight about money, and he had strangled her, unintentionally killing her.
Carman said he put her body in the bathroom first, and when he knew she was dead, stuffed her into the suitcase, Srathongyoo said, adding that none of the girl’s limbs were broken.
Her body was released to the family from a hospital in Bangkok on Monday. The cause of death was strangulation, Srathongyoo said, and there was no evidence of serious wounds to her face or head. DNA swabs from underneath the girl’s fingernails are still being tested.
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