Violent family land row creates doubts about death of grandfather, 106, days before court hearing
The sudden death of a 106-year-old man at his home in Nakhon Si Thammarat’s Thung Song district has brought an abrupt end to mediation in a family dispute that had seen his son and grandson sent to jail.
Plod Raksasat was found dead on Monday without any trace of wound or struggle just a few days before a scheduled court-appointed negotiation session regarding his request to revoke rubber plantation land inheritance rights granted to his son Chinnapon Rakworakitpakhin, 65, and Chinnapon’s son Pichitsak, 32.
Even though he was very old, Plod’s sudden death at this time has created doubts among some family members – including Chinnapon, who urged authorities to perform an autopsy.
The body was sent for an autopsy at the Songklanagarind Hospital’s morgue in Songkhla’s Hat Yai district. Thung Song superintendent Pol Colonel Khomsan Preuksawanich said the initial autopsy result was that Plod’s death was due to natural causes.
Plod had lived at a house in Tambon Thamyai along with his daughter-in-law Orapan Raksasat, 55, whose husband Prasert and son Jakkapan are serving 12-year jail terms for attempted murder linked to a 2012 shooting and wounding of Pichitsak in a dispute regarding the land.
Chinnapon and Prasert are both Plod’s sons, but they have different mothers.
The shooting of Pichitsak and incarceration of Prasert and his son deepened the wedge in the family. Previously, Plod had a lawyer file a lawsuit to take back five rai (0.8 hectares) of land he had given to Chinnapon (formerly also known as Plob Raksasat) and a two-rai plot given to Pichitsak in the hope that they would take care of him in his old age.
This resulted in a court settlement in 2016 that ordered the two men to provide Plod Bt8,000 a month starting from May 2016, plus a promise to pay Bt150,000 to help organise Plod’s funeral after he died.
The two men allegedly made inconsistent payments in the first 10 months and then stopped altogether after which Plod had a lawyer sue to take back the land and the court impounded the two plots pending their official return to Plod.
However, Chinnapon said on Thursday he had given his father financial support every month, and that he could present transaction records to back his claim. That led to the Thung Song Provincial Court setting this Friday as the date for a settlement meeting over the land plots.
In a related development on Wednesday, Orapan filed a police complaint claiming that Pichitsak had issued a verbal death threat on December 25 in anger over Plod’s lawsuit to take back the land.