Phuket Police: ‘Serial suicide’ girl a con artist

PHUKET: The “suicidal” teenage girl who threatened to hurl herself from a pedestrian walkway in Phuket Town yesterday is actually a serial con artist who has tried similar scams in other parts of the country, police say.

Phuket City Police Superintendent Wanchai Ekpornpit told the media today that police left Phuket yesterday to escort 19-year-old Orasa Lapruek back to her hometown of Roi-et, but by the time the vehicle reached Saraburi her shouting became so unbearable that police gave in to her demand to be released.

For the Phuket Gazette‘s previous report of how Ms Orasa spent 40 minutes threatening to jump from a footbridge near Satree Phuket School yesterday, click here.

They filed a report detailing the incident at Saraburi’s Muang District Police Station before returning to Phuket.

Subsequent investigation revealed the girl tried similar stunts in Pattaya in 2007 and in Hua Hin in August last year when she threatened to leap from the fourth floor of an office building.

She also once threatened to use a knife to kill herself outside a school in Petchaburi, Col Wanchai said.

The threatened suicides are not real, but intended as a source of money from sympathetic police and other people, he added.

She was also treated and released from a psychiatric hospital at least once, he said.

Social Development and Human Security officer Jitlada Sangprapan said her department will contact officials in Roi-Et province to try to learn more about her background and get her the help she needs.

Anyone who spots the girl should not give her money but report her presence to police.

Now that she is free she will likely try it again, she added.

Gazette readers fell for the girl’s ploy in Phuket yesterday (if indeed it was a ploy), with an outpouring of sympathy voiced in the paper’s online readers’ forum and in a number of letters to the editor encouraging donations for her benefit.