The perils of not wishing to be idle

RASSADA: Nhu Pakjaroong, 59, whose surname means “stop and relax”, was the sort of woman who refused to stay idle, said acquaintances. Rather than sit at home and look after her grandchildren, the resident of Soi Namchai in Tambon Rassada Moo 1 invited two friends to go out and scavenge the neighborhood for saleable junk. That, as it turned out, proved counter-productive. It was late afternoon on November 2. The elderly women had been out scavenging all day when they saw eight abandoned terraced houses on Soi Sor Malipant and entered. The houses, damaged by fire on September 11, were being demolished. Nhu noticed some wires hanging from the wall: “Hey, these are worth money,” she said to her friends. “Help me pull them out.” Much to the women’s consternation, however, pulling on the wires brought the entire brick wall down in a heap. Police found Nhu in her dark blue, flower-print sarong buried under the debris: right arm and left leg broken, her head split open – dead. Nhu’s two friends were uninjured. Next to the woman’s corpse police found a plastic bag filled with wires and various junk collected that day. Nhu had hoped to earn enough money selling junk to recyclers to pay her modest day-to-day expenses, said her friend Kaew Wongspakdi, 66. But that wasn’t her principal motive. In fact, she just didn’t want be idle.