“Pop your Clogs” (sleeping with a dead man)

What happens when a man dies in Thai prison? I’m not talking about those that have met their end through sickness or violence, even though there have been plenty of those. I’m talking about the sort of death that is sudden or unexpected, and that in no way has been prepared for. What happens if you just suddenly ‘Pop your Clogs’? Not the sort of question we like to ask ourselves on the whole but the answer was brought home to us a few nights ago when a Thai inmate a few cells up from ours decided he’d had enough and was ‘checking out’ for good.

 

It was shortly after ‘lockdown’ around 4pm that we first knew that something unusual was going on as one of the building two ex-doctor inmates who sleeps in the hallway between the cells, was shouting instructions to prisoners through the bars of a cell further up the row. We wasn’t sure what the commotion was about but the bell that summons the guard to unlock and enter the cell block was being sounded and it soon became obvious that someone was ill.

 

It turns out that one of the Thai inmates, a chap of 45, had suffered a severe heart attack. The orders being shouted in Thai had been the inmate/doctors orders to other prisoners in the cell. Basic instructions on how to perform C.P.R. on a man who had by this time stopped breathing. The ‘doc.’ Could not enter the cell himself until it had been unlocked by guards who would have to fetch the keys from main control outside the building.

 

The makeshift C.P.R. continued under the docs instructions for the next 20 minutes or so, but witnesses say that the other Thai inmates in the cell had never been trained and didn’t really have a clue what they were doing so it was a pathetic attempt at best.

Eventually we heard the block door being unchained and the bolts slid, and a group of 6-7 guards came up to the first floor to open the cell door for the doctor inmate. An on-call member of the prison night medical staff also arrived but neither he nor the guards were interested in entering the cell themselves and now it became the turn of the doctor inmate to perform C.P.R. under the watchful eye of the ‘spotty’ medical student in the filthy white house coat, shirt hanging out, with a ‘just woke up’ hair explosion, exuding the professionalism that we’ve learnt to expect from any member of Bangkwangs medical staff.

It soon became apparent that the fellah was not going to respond to the efforts to bring him back anymore than he would have, had no one bothered in the first place. He was dead and hell, he was staying dead.

 

Thai law is uncharacteristically very clear when it come to the death of an inmate in custody. It is strictly against the law to move the corpse in any way until a police investigation team has entered the prison, photographed and fingerprinted the body, recorded the evidence surrounding the death including witness statements, and actually pronounced the person dead through their own forensic doctor.

 

On that day the incident had occurred after lockdown and by the time the commotion had died down and everybody was satisfied that there was no more to be done, it was far too late and an unnecessary security risk to bring in an outside police investigation team at that time, so it was decided to leave the dead where he was until the next day. The cell was locked. The guards left and locked the building and 20 odd cellmates in the dead guys cell settled down to a much troubled sleep than the ‘Star of the Show’, being in the same cell as the stiff is one thing but imagine what was going through the minds of his Thai mates who slept either side of him. (“Did he owe me money?” or “at last, more room!”)

 

The following morning we were unlocked as usual and the living poured into the yard. Meanwhile the dead layed blissfully unaware that his shoes had been stolen and his breakfast shared equally amongst his ‘housemates’ and he took his first lay-in for years.

 

Electrical power to the cellblock is isolated every morning and so without fans the air in the block heats up rapidly in no time at all. By the time the outside police investigation team and photographers were ushered into the building, surrounded by guards and blueshirts, at around 11:30am, ‘Rip van winkle’ must have started to become a little ‘ripe’ the police team must certainly have thought sp as every one of them entered the block wearing surgical masks, but maybe it was only because our living quarters smell like the dead anyway.

30 minutes or so later, as the rest of us looked on, the team exited the block and made their way out of the building looking satisfied.

But hang on a minute! Hadn’t they forgotten something? Where was the stiff? Surely they hadn’t left him in there?

 

They had. There is no national ambulance service in Thailand and bodies from accidents, suicides, murders, or that just ‘crop up’ now and again as they are prone to do, are dealt with by a Chinese charity group called ‘Doh Tek Teung’ or the ‘Bodysnatchers’. The group are well funded by wealthy Thai-Chinese benefactors and have a fleet of ambulances and full-time volunteers at their disposal. Their vehicles are equipped with radio’s that are tuned into police wave bands and when there is a body or two to be dealt with they are often at the scene before the police.

 

On this occasion however it seemed the ‘Bodysnatchers’ had not been informed and so it was decided to let the body stay put until they had arrived. As the afternoon wore on though it was starting to look as though the stiff was going to be spending another night with his horrified cellmates.

Sure enough, 3:30pm came around and it was time to return to our cells for lockdown. Some bright spark had now tied ‘Matey’ in an old blanket (no doubt his own) and dragged him to the end of the hallway that joins the stairs. The police had been and gone so it was now ok to move the body but nobody thought to remove him from the block altogether and as we climbed the concrete steps to return to our cells there was a traffic jam as people stepped around the body or stopped to gawp and see who it was. Whoever has shrouded him in the grotty blue blanket had obviously had little experience in these matters because it was knotted over the corpse’s face with the eyes and forehead still visible above. Nobody had closed his eyes for him.

 

Just as we were sitting down in our cells ‘Poh Tek Teung’ volunteers finally arrived to take the body away. They had a wheeled stretcher with them but it was useless trying to juggle it around the ‘switchback’ on the stairs and so they decided on another way. The body itself was quite heavy and a dead weight so rather than lift him they dragged his body down the stairs feet first, his head banging on each step on the way down just to keep up the hysterics a little longer -  then he was gone.

Just a little too late someone in our cell came up with the idea of exchanging places with the stiff in an attempt to escape but we not very politely pointed out that he would have been dead before he had reached the bottom step, ‘brain’ dead anyway.

 

It turns out that there’s one more thing that a body must go through before it leaves Bangkwang  for good, just to make certain that the prisoner is indeed dead, the corpses wrists are sliced open and the Achilles tendons are severed on each ankle. They wouldn’t want a body up and legging it now would they. Dead or alive!