‘He makes dead people look like they’re asleep’: Thai volunteer’s cosmetic treatments give deceased a better goodbye
- Volunteer mortuary cosmetologist Pattipan Boonyee provides free cosmetic treatment services to poor bereaved families in Thailand
- His skill in making the dead look as lifelike as possible sees him in much demand and he has an army of fans on social media
Pattipan Boonyee pulls up a picture on his phone of a boy in a green T-shirt with chubby cheeks, a crewcut and a happy smile.
He was 11-year-old Tanawat. Now he is wrapped in a white body bag, lying on a stretcher at the morgue of the Police General Hospital’s Institute of Forensic Medicine in Bangkok.
Pattipan, a volunteer rescuer, has driven to the morgue in the Thai capital in his private ambulance with Tanawat’s grieving mother by his side. They have come to pick up the boy’s corpse to take it back to his hometown of Sri Racha in eastern Thailand for Buddhist funeral rites.
“It’s a sad case,” Pattipan, 41, says. “I deal with dead people every day, but cases like this are especially tragic.”
Tanawat was brutally murdered in early April by a 49-year-old Burmese man who had lived with the boy’s widowed grandmother. The migrant worker, local police say, has confessed to killing the fourth-grader with a sickle at a tapioca plantation after a dispute with his mother, Mullika Junduang.
“He was abusive and violent,” says Mullika, 27, who works as an accountant. “He said he would kill me and my son because I didn’t want my mother to be with him.”
