Police arrest woman jobless from Covid-19 for burglary
Police apprehended a woman in Nakhon Phanom who confessed to breaking into 8 homes in the area after the Covid-19 pandemic left her unemployed and broke. The 26 year old woman from Sri Songkhram district was caught with nearly 100 things she had stolen from the houses in the Muang municipal area where she lived in a rental house.
Residents had complained about a string of break-ins in Tambon Nong Saeng last week between August 5 and August 12. Valuable jewellery and religious trinkets were stolen like gold necklaces and Buddha amulets, along with cash and electronics like cameras and mobile phones.
The phones turned out to be the young woman’s downfall, as police were able to use location tracking to trace the signal of one stolen mobile phone to the house where the woman was found with the loot from her robberies.
The woman confessed to the crime and explained to police she was desperate for money to live as she told her story of loss during the global pandemic that has so damaged Thailand’s economy for the last year and a half. She told police she had been working in Bangkok when Covid-19 set in, and she eventually lost her job, then ended up divorcing her husband. Last month she left Bangkok and moved with her 3 children back to Nakhon Phanom, her home province in the Northeast of Thailand.
She rented the house and drove around on her motorbike every day searching for work but with Covid-19 nothing was available. She started to notice in her daily drives that some houses in the area were always empty. In desperation, she took a knife to the houses and used it to pop open windows and climb inside. She would steal whatever cash and objects of value she found inside and was slowly selling them off to support herself and her children each day as needed.
Police charged the woman with burglary and she remains in police custody now. Meanwhile, the homeowners have been contacted and told to check all their valuables to recover what she had stolen.
SOURCE: Bangkok Post
