The owners of a Chanthaburi-Bangkok minivan that slammed head-on into a pickup truck in Chonburi, killing 25 people, all Thai, insists the driver and vehicle were both sound.
Pattarapong Sueanak, who operates the service under a license from state enterprise Transport Co., told Thai media Jan. 3 that Sumon Ieamsombat had been well rested before making the ill-fated journey a day earlier that left bodies so badly burnt they could not be easily identified.
Fourteen people – four men and 10 women – died when the passenger van flew over a road-dividing ditch on Route 344 in Chonburi’s Ban Bung District and crashed head-on into a pickup truck packed with 12 people. Five men and six women died.
Witnesses said several of the victims, including a 3-year-old boy, were trapped and burned alive as the two vehicles caught fire following the crash. The fire started when the compressed natural gas cylinder in the back of the passenger van exploded.
Pattarapong told the Thai Rath newspaper that the van, which had left Bangkok early Jan. 2 and arrived in Chanthaburi, was on its way back to Bangkok at 11 a.m. He said the vehicle and the NGV cylinder had been recently inspected.
The van owner’s comments came after police publicly speculated that the driver fell asleep behind the wheel or that a tire exploded, causing Sumon to lose control.
Chonburi deputy governors Chaichan Eimcharoen and Chawalit Saeng-Uthai joined police in inspecting the crash scene late Monday.
Family members arrived at Police General Hospital struggling to identify their loved ones. In some cases, they had to be shown video of their relatives boarding the van before they died.
One witness wrote on Facebook that most of the witnesses did not bother to rush to the rescue of the trapped victims, but instead used their smartphones to take pictures of the incident.
“If (everyone) had helped separate the pickup truck from the van, some who were trapped in the truck might have survived,” he wrote.
One of the accolade-hungry shutterbugs defended the idle witnesses, saying they did their best and offered condolences to the dead.
