ICE Finally Cracks: Pornchai Moontri Arrives in Thailand

The most amazing account of survival and conversion in modern American Catholicism begins a new chapter as Pornchai Moontri is sent home to Thailand after 36 years.

I have read many riveting accounts of human survival and life changing conversion. In virtually all of them the most harrowing chapters are the last as the story turns down the road of some final test. This has been true in the story of Pornchai Moontri as well. If you are not yet familiar with all that preceded the most recent six months of his life, you should consider catching up. Many lives have been changed from this account of a soul ascending from the torment humans can inflict upon each other to the pinnacle of a life lived in the light of Divine Mercy. The best place to take that short journey is, “Pornchai Moontri: Mercy Inside Those Stone Walls,” by Felix Carroll.

But it is of the last six months that I now write. First, let me recap the previous 36 years. Most readers know that Pornchai was removed from his home in Thailand against his will in 1985. Taken by false pretense at age 11, he was brought to Bangor, Maine where he suffered years of sexual abuse and violence. Multiple attempts to flee resulted in police reports by local officers who did not understand his protests while he was handed back over to his tormentor. Finally, he escaped at age 14 and became homeless, and then a ward of the State, and then homeless again.

It was not until reading of Pornchai’s life of torment in these pages that law enforcement in the State of Maine took an interest, and opened an investigation into Pornchai’s life. Thirty-four years after the commission of his crimes, Richard Alan Bailey was convicted of forty felony counts of sexual abuse of Pornchai. The last person to confront Bailey about his crimes was Pornchai’s mother in the year 2000. As a proximate result, she was beaten to death in what remains today an unsolved “cold case” homicide on the Western Pacific U.S. Territorial Island of Guam.

Pornchai was in solitary confinement in the Maine State Prison when he learned of his mother’s death at the hands of the man who haunted his nightmares. He sank to the lowest bottom of life, a point from which he believed he could never return. There was no hope, no redemption, no future, and no God. All had been taken from him.

Five years later, Pornchai was moved to the New Hampshire State Prison. He could have ended up anywhere in the country, but Divine Providence had another plan. One year later, in 2006, he was living in a cell with me. Just imagine this. After all he had silently endured in life, he ended up in a prison cell with a Catholic priest falsely accused of the very things that destroyed him. Only God could have devised such a starting point for a relationship that would reshape lives and redirect the future.

Four years later, in 2010, Pornchai was received into the Catholic faith on Divine Mercy Sunday. He took the name, Maximilian, after the Saint of Auschwitz who gave his life to salvage the life of another prisoner. A new life had arisen from the wreckage of the past. Finding redemption in the most unlikely place, Pornchai’s new life gave voice to Saint Paul’s revelation in Romans (5:20):

“Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more. ”

— Romans (5:20)

Two years later in 2012, Pornchai delivered the Valedictorian address for his high school graduating class. From there he obtained a scholarship for Catholic Studies at Catholic Distance University from where he maintained a perfect 4.0 GPA. Then he completed two diploma programs in psychology and social work at the Stratford Career Institute, and a certificate in Culinary Arts at the NH Prison’s Career and Technical Education Center. I was an eager beneficiary of that particular new skill. He also completed hundreds of hours in programs like Restorative Justice, Interpersonal Violence Prevention, Alternatives to Violence (for which he became a mentor and facilitator), and Father Michael Gaitley’s entire Hearts Afire list of programs. Father Gaitley then invited both of us to official membership in the Marian Missionaries of Divine Mercy.

Part II: Thrust Back upon the Road to Perdition

Clare Farr, a trademarks attorney in Western Australia and part of a small Intellectual Property law firm, worked with me and together, from two continents, we brought Richard Alan Bailey to justice. Pornchai could never imagine this to be possible, but it happened. Clare also assisted me in negotiations with the Maine prison system that had jurisdiction over Pornchai's case. No one who came to know this story believed that his own offense would have ever happened had he not first been the victim of horrible crimes. We were successful, and Pornchai was granted substantial earned time off his sentence for his remarkable efforts at rehabilitation.

On September 8, 2020, Pornchai was handed back over to Maine officials for the final days of his sentence. He wrote of this moment in a most moving guest post, “Pornchai Moontri: Hope and Prayers for My Friend Left Behind.” Just three days later, on September 11, 2020, Pornchai was handed over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for removal from the United States. This became the final test that I mentioned at the beginning of this post.

September 11 was a Friday so Pornchai spent that weekend locked alone in a cell in the Cumberland County Jail in Portland, Maine. The fact that his sentence had already been served in full seemed completely lost on his keepers. He was told repeatedly that he is no longer a prisoner, but is now an ICE detainee. Alone in his cell, he had no contact with anyone, no access to a telephone, and no information. Clare Farr contacted ICE and was told that Pornchai would be moved to the Boston area on the following Monday to prepare for his travel to Thailand. When Monday and the ICE officers came, they told Pornchai the same thing, adding that he will be in Thailand by the end of September.

That night, he was taken to an air field in New Hampshire and flown along with dozens of Latino detainees on an ICE plane to Texas. Others detained at the Southern border were picked up there, and they were all flown to a private, for-profit GEO Group ICE detention facility in Pine Prairie, Western Louisiana. Meanwhile, ICE agents instructed the Royal Thai Consulate in New York to send Pornchai’s official travel documents to Boston — where they sat, lost, for weeks.

It took me a few days to find Pornchai. I had given him the number of his Godmother, Charlene Duline, and coached him to memorize it. I told him to call her collect from anywhere, and from there we could get funds onto a telephone account for him. He called, but did not understand that the system requires several minutes to process a collect call. Charlene, a former State Department Foreign Service Officer well acquainted with bureaucracy, was doing her best but Pornchai kept hanging up after waiting several minutes. Calls to the for-profit ICE facility for assistance were only met with rude refusals to assist.

I tell this story to convey the ridiculous nature of the one-size-fits-all treatment of ICE detainees. We had a team working on three continents to assist Pornchai, but we were challenged to our limit. What must some poor Mexican or Honduran family go through to navigate the nightmare of ICE? Not accepting defeat, and refusing to lose touch with Pornchai, I had to call Clare Farr in Australia who in turn called the ICE officer assigned to Pornchai’s case in Louisiana. He then had to call the GEO facility in Pine Prarie, LA, to tell a staff member to walk 20 feet to Pornchai’s cell and tell him to stay on the phone until his call can be processed.

It went like this day after day, week after week, month after month. ICE agents would show up once a week and Pornchai would ask them when he is leaving. “Maybe in a week or two,” he was always told. Inquiries from Clare Farr met with more cooperation, but no more honesty. She was told that ICE is actively working with the Thai Consulate to arrange travel. This was said on October 1. Two weeks later, Clare’s email to the Thai Consulate revealed that no contact from ICE had ever taken place.

Because Pornchai was originally under the jurisdiction of the State of Maine, we reached out to the office of Maine Senator Susan Collins for assistance. Her office declined to become involved. We then reached out to the office of Senator Angus King. His office made a determined effort to intercede with ICE, but received only a blunt refusal on the part of ICE to cooperate. It was made clear to us that ICE is accountable to no one.

Part III: Jena, Louisiana

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of all this is the exploitation of detainees and their loved ones, most of whom are already financially challenged. Food portions are scant, and then food is sold to detainees at astronomical rates. Phone calls to loved ones were charged at 11-cents per minute with big kickbacks to the facility. A tablet for messages and games was available for lease at the rate of $24 per 8-hour shift. On a weekly basis, we provided funds for food and phone so Pornchai could remain in touch. I insisted that he call daily. I knew only too well how easily someone could simply “disappear” in ICE detention.

In the first week of October, Pornchai was suddenly moved to a facility in Jena, Louisiana in the center of the state. It was another for-profit detention center owned by GEO Group. We inquired with ICE headquarters in Washington, DC and were told that if Pornchai was moved to Jena, it’s because he is “very close” to a flight to Thailand. In a noisy, chaotic environment with up to 70 detainees in a room with blaring lights on around the clock, I feared for Pornchai’s safety and sanity.

The census consisted mostly of Central Americans detained at the Southern border. Only three of the 70, including Pornchai, were Asian: one from Laos, and one — an 18-year-old who spoke no English — from Vietnam. The young Vietnamese man had been there in Jena for over a year and had no contact with anyone outside. Pornchai asked if he could buy some extra food for him. I was embarrassed that he asked. He very quickly moved into the bunk above Pornchai who managed to keep him out of the drama always raging around them.

We hoped and prayed that the stay in Jena would not be long, but October came and went. Pornchai said he protested one day that his prison sentence is over so why is he still in prison? He was told, : “If you don't like it, you shouldn't have come to this country.” That spoke volumes about the amount of background ICE bothers to gather about detainees in their custody.

Complicating matters somewhat, Thailand had closed its borders to travellers with the exception of the repatriation of its own citizens. We were able to obtain a monthly list of repatriation flights to keep Pornchai’s hopes up. Several of these flights were out of New Orleans where jurisdiction over Pornchai’s ICE file resided. We would pour over these lists of flights trying to determine which ones Pornchai might be on. This became a futile and frustrating effort as October turned to November with no progress in sight.

When Pornchai was moved to Louisiana, jurisdiction over his Thai citizenship was transferred from the Royal Thai Consulate General in New York to the Thai Embassy in Washington. The Embassy was more than cooperative with us, and highly professional — a real tribute to the government and people of Thailand. The travel documents issued by the Embassy were valid for ninety days and would expire on December 10. Surely, we thought, ICE would not simply let them expire without action leaving Pornchai stranded and having to start all over again.

But that is exactly what they did. It was at that time that Catholic League President Bill Donohue and I put together a petition to the White House to spark some action in this matter. We had no idea at the time just how mired in its own drama the White House would become. Hundreds of Catholic League members and our own readers took part in that petition, and I thank you all. We may never know what impact this had on the final outcome, but my respect for Bill Donohue and the Catholic League has become immense.

Starting in early November, one of our friends, nurse and prolife activist Claire Dion, developed a plan that would allow Pornchai and me to speak each day. She sacrificed a lot to bring this about. Seven nights a week, Claire would be available to facilitate a conference call between Pornchai and me. This great effort is demonstrated in the photo below. It depicts one of our conversations which, for my part, became a daily pep talk to give Pornchai hope that even being encased in ICE will one day come to an end. The photo is somewhat humorous as Claire placed two cell phones with microphones and speakers opposite each other, but it worked.

Part IV: Navigating through the Night

Navigating Pornchai’s pain and frustration in these nightly calls was equally frustrating for me, but the calls were very necessary. As 2020 turned to 2021, our entire team had become almost as despondent as Pornchai. Was there to be no hope? On December 30, at my request, Clare Farr in Australia filed a civil rights petition with the Department of Homeland Security in Washington. As the agency that oversees ICE, we asked DHS to review Pornchai’s case for removal. As with other efforts, we may never know what impact, if any, this had behind the scenes. Bill Donohue and the Catholic League doubled down on their effort to bring this story to the White House.

Then our contact in Thailand obtained from the Embassy a list of the repatriation flights for January. There were only seven, and all were flying out of JFK International in New York. On that same day, I received a message from Australia with news from ICE that Pornchai would soon be relocated to New York. We were so hopeful that I made the mistake of conveying both pieces of news to Pornchai. Just days later, my heart sank as I had to tell him the news that all the repatriation flights scheduled for JFK for the month were filled and he did not make the cut. We were both devastated.

In mid January we received word that Pornchai was scheduled for a non-repatriation flight on January 25 to Seoul, South Korea. From there, he would board another flight to Bangkok. Pornchai was elated beyond measure with this news, and so were we. However, three days before the flight I had to convey to him the bad news that ICE postponed it. I believe that the ICE bureaucracy arranged the flight from New York to Bangkok but neglected to arrange to get him from Louisiana to New York.

We then learned that the flight was rescheduled for February 8. This became even more hopeful when ICE flew Pornchai from Louisiana to New York on February 3. His last five days in ICE custody proved to be the worst of all. He was locked in solitary confinement with only 20 minutes per day out of his cell with a choice of either a shower or a phone call. He had plenty of time alone to let his anxieties run amok. He feared another postponement and an extension of that nightmare. But he prayed, and knew that I prayed as well.

I would be remiss to not add the most important paragraph of this post. I was at the end of my third attempt at a Novena to Mary, Undoer of Knots. By this third effort, I had transitioned from prayerful, to cautiously hopeful, to downright demanding. She had, after all, intervened for us many times to undo the inevitable knots of prison. Surely ICE would not defeat Her! And it did not.

At noon on February 8, ICE agents escorted Pornchai aboard a Korean Airlines flight to Seoul out of JFK Airport. Sixteen hours later he boarded another flight from Seoul to Bangkok arriving at 11:27pm (Bangkok time) on February 9. He was exhausted but ready to face a new challenge in his life, and adjustment to freedom and a country and culture he had not seen for 36 years.

The Thai government has taken many steps to confront the Covid-19 crisis including the closing of its borders to international flights. Returning Thai citizens are required to spend their first 15 days home in quarantine at a hotel assigned by the Thai government. Our friend and Thai contact, Viktor Weyand scrambled to raise funds for the hotel stay and the reservations were made. Pornchai was assigned to a spacious room at the Holiday Inn Express Bangkok near the center of the city. He arrives there early in the morning on the day this is posted.

After all these years living with me in a 60-square-foot cell, he may find his room at the Holiday Inn to be too daunting and the bed just a bit too soft. I have already made him promise not to sleep in the bathtub.

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Addendum: Unlike Pornchai’s entire five-month stay with ICE, the two ICE agents who escorted him to Bangkok had obviously done a bit of homework. He reports that they were both professional and kind. Yes, even in a government bureaucracy one can be both. I commend these agents and I thank them.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Donors purchased an iPhone for Pornchai which was left in his Holiday Inn Express hotel room to figure out. He has never touched, or even seen, a smart phone. For that matter, neither have I. But we will be speaking as soon as he can take a call. That will hopefully happen on the day this is posted. I asked him what is the first thing he will do after his 5-month ordeal in ICE. He said he will take a 6-hour bath and then sleep. Pornchai lost 20 pounds during his stay with ICE, but Viktor Weyand sent me a copy of the hotel’s Thai menu. Those pounds are not lost for long!

I will keep you posted on progress — and maybe a few selfies taken with the iPhone. Pornchai has the challenge of his life ahead. He is now adjusting to freedom and a new country and culture all at once after 28 years in prison and a 36-year absence from his homeland. Please pray for him.

He said he can’t wait to see Beyond These Stone Walls, on his iPhone, and then tell me what it looks like.

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Here are the related links presented in this post:

Human Traffic: The ICE Deportation of Pornchai Moontri

Pornchai Moontri: Hope and Prayers for My Friend Left Behind

and one other that I recommend:

Saint Maximilian Kolbe Led Us into the Heart of Mary.

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An Open and Urgent Letter to President Donald Trump

In his 2020 State of the Union Address, President Trump showed mercy on some who had tragically fallen. This is a plea for mercy and justice for Pornchai Moontri.

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December 2, 2020

Dear Mr. President: 

I write on behalf of many Catholic followers of Divine Mercy with an urgent but simple appeal. Putting the politics of this nation's polarization aside, I join many American Catholics and people of other faiths who have been moved by your consistent agenda to promote both law and order and much needed reform of the criminal justice system. I wrote for publication about your landmark effort in "President Donald Trump's First Step Act for Prison Reform."

It is a basic tenet of your First Step Act that when a prison term has been fully served, it should not continue in other forms such as joblessness, job discrimination, and society's ongoing pointed finger of shame. Your First Step Act is a second chance for many to rise above the past and embrace a future of hope. This will be a part of your legacy for years to come. 

I am writing to request the assistance of your Administration in what should be a simple matter. As a teenager at age eighteen, Pornchai Moontri committed a crime out of desperation. He has served every day of his sentence and was released  at age forty-seven on September 11, 2020 to the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement for deportation to his native Thailand. 

Mr. President, it is important to note that neither Mr. Moontri nor his many advocates and friends who have become his family in America are seeking commutation of his removal order. However, that could also be a just and merciful outcome. In lieu of that, what he and we seek is his rapid repatriation to his native Thailand, a nation from which, as you will read below, he was removed at age eleven as a victim of human trafficking. Since having fully served his prison sentence, Mr. Moontri has experienced an unjust and merciless three-month extension of that sentence with no end in sight. 

Taxpayers already have spent far more for Mr. Moontri's detention than would have been spent for his removal. We, his advocates, are more than willing to purchase his airfare to Thailand if permitted. We have built a future for him there with good people who anxiously await his return. This could be remedied easily by your office with a simple phone call.

There is much more to this story which should become part of your discernment on the right course of action. Pornchai Moontri was a child victim of human trafficking. He was abandoned by his mother at age two in Thailand. She fell under the influence and control of an American, Richard Alan Bailey, who brought her to the U.S.  After a passage of nine years, Bailey sent her to retrieve Pornchai at age eleven and bring him to this country. 

Pornchai was imprisoned by Bailey who repeatedly raped and beat him. At age thirteen he escaped but was returned by local police who did not understand his Thai protests. At age fourteen he escaped again and became a homeless adolescent living on the streets of a foreign country. At age eighteen, intoxicated and broken, he took a man's life during a struggle. 

While awaiting trial at age eighteen in 1992, Pornchai was visited by his mother who told him that Richard Bailey would harm her if Pornchai divulged any of what had happened to him. In fear for his mother’s life, Pornchai thus remained silent throughout his trial, refusing to participate in his own defense. In 2000, while attempting to leave Richard Bailey, Pornchai's mother was murdered on the U.S. Territorial Island of Guam while in Bailey's company. She was beaten to death. This matter remains an unsolved “cold case” homicide despite new evidence pointing to an obvious suspect who has never answered for this crime.

In 2018, after becoming fully aware of this story, from articles I had written and published, Pornchai's advocates brought Richard Bailey to justice. On September 12, 2018 Bailey was convicted in Penobscot (Maine) Superior Court on forty felony counts of child sexual abuse against Pornchai Moontri. 

A simple Google search of "Pornchai Moontri" will reveal much documentation of the above. It will also reveal the talented, gifted, intelligent man that Pornchai has become. Pornchai became a devout Catholic convert and a celebrated member of the Divine Mercy movement in the Catholic Church. He has been the subject of numerous published articles and a book, Loved, Lost, Found by Marian Press editor and author, Felix Carroll. 

As I mentioned above, it would be both justice and mercy if Pornchai's deportation order could be commuted, but he would nonetheless leave the United States for Thailand of his own accord. A life and future have been built for him there as a valued member of Divine Mercy Thailand. Regardless of what you decide in this matter, Mr. President, we implore you to help us get him out of ICE custody to commence rapid repatriation to his native land. Pornchai has suffered more than enough for one lifetime. 

Respectfully Yours, 

Father Gordon J. MacRae

BeyondTheseStoneWalls.com

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Editor’s Note: Please also read and share these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls: 

Human Traffic: The ICE Deportation of Pornchai Moontri

President Donald Trump’s First Step Act for Prison Reform

Trump at Mount Rushmore, Lincoln at the Emancipation

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Help Pornchai

Please help us seek the assistance of President Trump by adding your voice to this petition. Please copy and paste the statement below to: https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/ in the section WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO SAY?

Re: Pornchai Moontri ICE detention A-039064244

Pornchai went to prison at age eighteen for a crime of desperation. Having served his prison sentence in full, he was released at age forty-seven to the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for deportation to his native Thailand.

Pornchai was taken from Thailand at age eleven as a victim of human trafficking by an American who has recently been convicted of forty felony counts of sexual assault against Pornchai as a child.

With the help from a Catholic priest in prison, Pornchai sought counseling for severe PTSD, became educated graduating with highest honors, completed numerous programs in restorative justice and mental health, and is today a celebrated Catholic convert and member of the Divine Mercy movement in the Catholic Church. He has been the subject of numerous published articles and a book.

Now he is an ICE detainee held far beyond his sentence at an overcrowded for-profit ICE facility in Jena, LA. His ninety day travel documents issued by his embassy were allowed to expire with no action on his removal.

If you Google "Pornchai Moontri" you will be hard pressed to find a "criminal alien" in the results. As a person who has followed the story of Pornchai Moontri, I implore our government to secure the immediate repatriation of this remarkable man and survivor.

For further info, contact: maxmoontri (at) gmail (dot) com

Thank you!

Human Traffic: The ICE Deportation of Pornchai Moontri

Taken from Thailand to America at age 11 by a now-convicted sex offender, this Thai victim will now be an ICE detainee awaiting forced deportation 36 years later.

Posted August 19, 2020; updated July 11, 2022 by Father Gordon MacRae

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Editor’s Note: This revised article by Father Gordon MacRae is a necessary expansion of the stunning post by Pornchai Moontri entitled “Independence Day in Thailand.”

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“I’m reclaiming my time!” That term became a familiar line of political theater during a recent congressional grilling of Attorney General William Barr. Our friend, Father George David Byers, wrote a short post highlighting the ridiculous nature of that sad moment in American politics.

I’m reclaiming my time, too. All 26 years of it. That’s how long I have been unjustly held in an American prison while its crazy politics play out before polarized audiences. At about the time I reach the 26-year mark in September 2020, my friend, Pornchai Moontri will have been handed over to the hidden national shame of ICE detention. It is easy to stay on the sidelines and keep this topic out of sight and out of mind until someone you know and care about is on the receiving end of it.

This looming deportation process, especially its weeks or months in overcrowded detention, is a personal crisis for us. The politics of it do not help at all. A word of advice: Try to avoid having a crisis in a deeply divided presidential election year. It will inevitably become subjected to the political, and some of those around you will use it to score political talking points.

It has already been suggested to me that President Donald Trump is to blame for my friend’s looming deportation, and for the inhumane treatment that he and other ICE detainees will endure. The deportation order that is just now unfolding in the case of Pornchai Moontri was a decision of a federal judge in 2007. It’s the result of a one-size-fits-all policy requiring removal of any non-citizen who commits any crime on U.S. soil regardless of circumstances.

Then it was suggested to me that ICE detention and forced removal is a strictly Republican endeavor that Democrats would happily fix if elected and given the power to do so. I subscribe to a publication of the Human Rights Defense Center called Prison Legal News. If anything, it leans to the left of our divisive political spectrum. In the July 2017 issue is a well researched article by Derek Gilna entitled “Deportations of Undocumented Reach Record High.” It is an analysis of deportations in the six years prior to the 2016 election. Here is an important excerpt:

“In the past six years, the number of people removed from the country against their will far surpassed the totals of the previous administration of George W. Bush reaching over two million people. According to human rights advocates, President Obama had become the ‘Deporter in Chief.’”

So please don’t subject the real human tragedy of what is happening now to the polarity of our “if you’re not with us you’re against us” politics. We are struggling right now behind These Stone Walls and I do not want our struggle to become political ammunition. Instead, I want to point you to something deeply unjust — demonic would be a better word — that has happened here. In his recent post, “Pornchai Moontri: Hope and Prayers, for a Friend Left Behind,” Pornchai wrote something that struck me like lightning and stabbed at my conscience as an American:

“In December of 1985 I was taken from Thailand and brought against my will to the United States. Though it was my mother who took me, I did not know her. She had abandoned my brother and me in Thailand when I was only two years old. She waited until I was age eleven to come and take me away because her life was under the control of a monster who sent her to bring me to him. It is that simple, and that terrible.”

An American Horror Story

Pornchai’s mother would later be murdered — beaten to death according to the autopsy report — on the U.S. Territorial Island of Guam in the company of Richard Bailey. Referred to by Pornchai as “An American Horror Story,” the case remains today an unsolved “cold case” homicide despite new evidence pointing to Bailey.

The murder occurred in 2000 as Wannee filed for divorce from Bailey and just before court-ordered dispersal of finances and property to Wannee was to take place. After the murder, Bailey sold his home and left Guam without settling the financial court orders with Wannee’s estate. He returned to Thailand to bring back a young Thai woman barely out of her teens. They settled in Oregon.

Back in the 1970s when Bailey prepared to bring Wannee from Bangkok to the United States, he knew she left two young sons behind in Thailand but he had no interest in a two-year-old. They settled in Bailey’s town of Bangor, Maine. Just blocks away, Stephen King was writing his own American horror stories. Bailey bided his time until Pornchai was 11 years old. Then, in 1985 he sent Wannee to Thailand to retrieve her sons.

This is a clear story of human trafficking, but it remains off that radar screen. In Bailey’s devious and narcissistic mind, these were human beings whose rights were at his personal disposal. Bailey would not permit Wannee to apply for U.S. citizenship. He knew her sons would one day reach an age that no longer interested him. It would thus be easier to be rid of them if they were not citizens.

In September 2018, Richard Bailey was finally brought to some form of justice. He entered a “no contest” plea deal, but was found guilty in Penobscot (Maine) Superior Court on forty felony counts of violent sexual assault against Pornchai and his brother. He was sentenced to 44 years in prison, all suspended, and 18 years of supervised probation. He returned to his lakeside home in Oregon without ever serving a day in prison.

That the vicious sexual and physical assaults against Pornchai and his brother had never previously been investigated or prosecuted remains another unsolved mystery. They took place over four years after Pornchai’s arrival in Bangor in 1985. There were school reports of a battered child. There were neighbors who expressed concern about the bleeding and traumatized Asian boy at their door pleading for help in a foreign language. There were reports from sheriff’s deputies who picked up a runaway child and handed him back over to Richard Bailey because they could not understand his protests.

Bailey’s violence and perversion drove Pornchai into homelessness — a teen stranded in a foreign country. There were reports filed by staff at the Maine Youth Center that took custody of Pornchai at age 14. There were reports when he was made a ward of the state at age 15. There were reports when he again became a homeless adolescent living alone on the streets of Bangor at age 16. It does not take rocket science to connect all this to the offense of a drunken 18-year-old in 1992. But all this history just disappeared.

Pornchai could not himself raise it. Right under the noses of state officials, Richard Bailey sent a battered and desperate Thai woman — Pornchai’s mother — to warn him while held pre-trial at the county jail that her life would be in danger if Pornchai told. Pornchai thus refused to participate in his own defense.

At sentencing, Judge Margaret Kravchuk told him that he was given a new life in America but squandered it.

Certainly no one can claim that sexual abuse was not on the public radar at that time. Just one state away in New Hampshire in 1988, a witch hunt was underway involving Catholic priests. The story that sent me to prison was just taking shape at that time while some local lawyers were taking out their calculators. The dollar signs were dangled before them by a local sex-crimes detective who brought over 1,000 cases while Maine, right next door, was ignoring the predator who was openly destroying the lives of three young Thai immigrants. A lot of people in the State of Maine covered up for Richard Bailey. Who investigates the investigators?

Fifth Commandment: Thou shalt not kill

Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam

On the U.S. territorial Island of Guam, officials have reacted with silence about inquiries into the unsolved homicide of Wannee in 2000. The Guam police, the Attorney General, and the U.S. Attorney there have been only minimally responsive over the last two years.

Pornchai Moontri, whose life was destroyed by Richard Bailey when he was twelve to fourteen years old, has now spent the last 28 years in prison for an offense that Bailey himself set in motion. In days or weeks, Pornchai will be moved to an overcrowded ICE holding facility where he will be forced to wait out the Covid-19 pandemic sleeping on a dayroom floor filled with ICE detainees.

Meanwhile, Richard Bailey, now convicted of 44 felony counts of sexual abuse against Pornchai and his brother, has not spent a single night in prison. He waits out the pandemic in his lakeside home in Oregon. He has simply ignored attempts by Pornchai’s advocates to recover what he owes to Wannee’s estate — funds that could make an enormous difference to someone who must now start his shattered life over. Not a single American attorney would agree to represent Pornchai for civil protection.

In his moving recent post, “ Hope and Prayers for My Friend Left Behind,” Pornchai himself raised the enormous paradox in our parallel stories of imprisonment:

“Father Gordon MacRae freed me from the evil this man inflicted on me. He taught me that this evil is not mine to keep. What do I do with such a story? If Father G had not been here, what would have become of me? He freed my mind and soul from the horror inflicted by a real predator. It breaks my heart that the man responsible for my freedom will now be left behind in prison.”

These are Pornchai’s questions, but they are not the questions I would ask. For 26 years, I have witnessed the unbridled outrage leveled at Catholic bishops and priests over allegations of sexual abuse and the necessity of protecting the vulnerable from abusers. But Americans are very selective in their outrage. Is there none left for Richard Bailey? Is there no outrage for Pornchai’s expulsion from the very country where his horrific abuse took place?

Some time ago, I wrote a post entitled, “President Donald Trump’s First Step Act for Prison Reform.” This President undertook a bold initiative for criminal justice. He called for the removal of “The Box” from all federal employment application forms. “The Box” was infamous among prisoners. It was a check-off box on most employment applications asking if the applicant has ever been convicted of a felony. In effect, it was an extension of a prison sentence that had long since been fully served. It took a non-politician to do what most politicians lack the political will or courage to do. “The Box” served only one purpose: to prevent former prisoners from finding meaningful jobs.

The President’s rationale for this is the fact that if a man or woman applying for a job had ever been in prison, the fact that they are now filling out this application means that the sentence has been served and it is over.

ICE Detention

By mid-September 2020, Pornchai Moontri will have fully served the entire sentence that the State of Maine imposed upon him at age eighteen. He has accomplished many things in that time, and is today an asset, not a hindrance, to his country. His country is Thailand, but he was taken from there as a child by a monstrous American predator who has never answered for it. Now America will keep the predator in freedom while expelling the victim.

The truth is that Pornchai wants to go and is ready to go. Thanks to These Stone Walls, a future has been built there for him, and a fresh start with people who will care for him. Our well-founded concern is not for his deportation, but for the added insult and injury that he must emerge from prison just to wait out this pandemic in a horribly crowded ICE detention facility — aka, another prison. He could not be deemed any threat to the community because his sentence is over. If he were not an ICE detainee, he would simply walk free.

And he could not be considered a flight risk because he has worked long and hard to build a future in Thailand that he now looks forward to. The Divine Mercy Thailand organization has a team waiting for Pornchai. The Father Ray Foundation (www.fr-ray.org) has a plan for training him and putting his skills to use. It is an awesome place as a visit to their website will show.

Public risk and flight risk are the only real reasons why ICE detainees are held. We were hoping and praying that bail could be arranged for Pornchai to live in the community until Thailand can open its borders for a flight during this pandemic. Some TSW readers nearby had an ideal location for Pornchai to spend those weeks learning instead of just surviving. However that was deemed to be impossible.

What follows is a recent letter I received from another former prisoner, an Asian friend from here who recently went through ICE deportation and is now back in his native country after an ordeal lasting months:

“You will first sit in a holding tank with a bunch of junkies and young criminals whining about a two-week county sentence in a county jail. Then at about 11 PM you will get moved to a federal detention pod. If you are lucky you might get a cell with one other person, but more likely you will be sent to a crowded dayroom with a thin mattress. You will have to find a place to put it among the crowd. If there are no bunks, they use these things like plastic canoes to sleep in. You will have to find a place to park it. One of the cells is kept empty so all the detainees living on the dayroom floor can use the single toilet in it.”

Justice is supposed to be blind, but sometimes it is deaf and dumb too. Our friend deserves better than to go to his new life like this. Here is a small exercise in the blindness of criminal justice you can easily do and that we now hope those who measure Pornchai will do. He has the most unlikely internet footprint of any person who has been in a U.S. prison for 28 years. Do a google search for “Pornchai Moontri” using the quotes. It is a great stretch of the imagination that the results are anything less than a good man deserving of our protection. America was once better than this.

Please pray for us as we do for you.

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UPDATE: July 11, 2022 — Guam Daily Post reporter Nick Delgado has published an article about the plethora of “cold case” unsolved homicides on the U.S. Territorial Island of Guam. Pornchai’s mother, Wannee, is number 70 on the list. Guam’s authorities remain unresponsive to new evidence and other new information on this case.

Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Pornchai Moontri was handed over to ICE on September 11, 2020. He and we were told by ICE officials that he would be in Thailand by the end of the month. Instead, he spent the next 150 days in a room holding 70 detainees in a for-profit ICE detention facility in Jenna, Louisiana. He arrived in Thailand in mid-March 2021. As of June 19, 2021 his Thai State ID and full citizenship remain mired in bureaucracy. Without it, he is unable to find work, open an account, or support himself.

For the full story of Pornchai’s life, don’t miss:

Human Trafficking: Thailand to America and a Cold Case in Guam.

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Pornchai Moontri: Bangkok to Bangor, Survivor of the Night

This is the long-awaited story of Pornchai Moontri and Fr. Gordon MacRae, two lives denied justice and deprived of hope that converged upon the Great Tapestry of God.

Editor’s note: The photo of Pornchai Moontri at the top of this post was a middle school yearbook photo taken at age 12 just after his arrival in America and just prior to the onset of events described in this post. His brother Priwan wrote the word “Brother” with the two hearts under the photo in the yearbook.

In nine years of writing for Beyond These Stone Walls, this is the most important post I have ever composed. If you have never before shared my posts on social media or emailed them to friends, I urge you to share this one. It is not about me — at least, not directly. It is about something that has haunted my every day for the last twelve years. It’s about someone who committed a ‘real’ and tragic criminal act, but was himself the victim of a horrible crime. It is something so ironic it defies belief.

I recently hinted that this story was coming. After twelve years in the making it came to its apex this month on the Feast of the Most Holy Name of Mary. Here’s what I wrote in a recent post about “Mary, Undoer of Knots”:

“I want to put some unexpected context on the significance of that day — September 10, 1985 — as I eulogized my beloved Uncle near Harvard. Unbeknownst to me, on that same day and moment on the far side of the world, Pornchai Moontri turned 12 years old in Bangkok, Thailand where he was reunited with his mother after her ten-year absence from his life. On that day, he began a journey to a promised new life in America.”

Six-and-a-half years later, on Saturday evening, March 21, 1992, in a state of intoxication, 18-year-old Pornchai Moontri walked into a Bangor, Maine supermarket and tried to walk out with a six-pack of beer. He was chased into the parking lot. In his drunken state Pornchai had trouble piecing together what came next. He heard much of it for the first time sitting in court.

As he fled across the Shop’n Save parking lot that night, 27 year-old Michael Scott McDowell injected himself into the scene. He saw store employees chasing a young Asian man and assumed it was for shoplifting. The much larger McDowell tackled Pornchai and wrestled him to the ground. Pinned down and helpless, Pornchai described this moment in “Pornchai’s Story” as “something that lived in me got out.”

Pornchai remembers getting up and running, running, running. Later that night he wandered the streets alone, exhausted and confused. He lived on those streets, a homeless teenager in a small port city of 31,000 in a foreign country. He slept under a bridge. As he fled, hunted, through the streets of Bangor that night, a car pulled up. A man he neither knew nor remembers told him to get in.

There, in that vehicle, he sat in silence until the police came for him. To this day, he knows nothing of the identity of the man who sheltered him. Pornchai was charged with assault with a deadly weapon, a knife he carried for protection while living on the streets. The next morning, the police told him that the charge is upgraded to murder. Michael Scott McDowell had died.

On Thursday, September 30, 1992, journalist Steve Kloehn penned a report for the Bangor Daily News entitled, “McDowell murder closed with a verdict, not a reason.” Its opening paragraph set the stage for the mystery contained therein:

“Thomas Goodwin, representing the state of Maine, was trying to explain to a jury the inexplicable: how Pornchai Moontri walked into the Shop’n Save a teenager and came out a murderer.”

Until now, I have not been able to write the whole truth of my last twelve years behind these stone walls. I have alluded to some of it in cryptic prose, but not everyone caught it. But many understood that there is an important story coming, a true story of unimaginable pain, power, and consequence. This is the most important post I have ever written.

If you have been reading these pages with any regularity at all, then you have come to know Pornchai “Maximilian” Moontri. This is his story, and it may bring tears. It should. But the sun also rises, and with the long awaited dawn comes — if not rejoicing — then at least a modicum of peace.

Solitary Confinement

Pornchai and I first met at the New Hampshire State Prison in 2006. He had been transferred from a “Supermax” prison in the State of Maine where he served the previous fourteen years — half of them in the utter cruelty of solitary confinement. He had a short fuse. He lived with a despair and a rage that walls could not contain.

The system deemed Pornchai to be dangerous, unfit for the presence of other human beings. A day in his life in Maine’s “supermax” prison was chronicled by the social justice site, “Solitary Watch” in an article entitled, “Welcome to Supermax.” After fourteen years in and out of that horror — including nearly four years in one long grueling stretch — Pornchai was transferred to another state.

The transfer from a prison in Maine to one in New Hampshire was administrative and not at Pornchai’s request. His arrival in 2006 took him to a very familiar place: an initial stay in solitary confinement. After a few months he was sent to a close custody unit, and finally to a unit in the general prison population where he and I met and became friends in early 2007.

I remember the first time we met. I was walking through the prison “chow hall” carrying my tray of food. As I made my way among the crowded tables looking for a seat, I heard my name. “Hey G, sit here with us.” I spotted my young Indonesian friend, Jeclan Wawarunto sitting next to the meanest looking young Asian man I had ever encountered. I could instantly see why the other two seats at their table were still empty.

“Come sit with us,” said the ever-smiling Jeclan. “This is my new friend, Ponch. He just got here.” As I sat down, I looked into the dark eyes of the young man across from me and saw anger, but it was anger masking something else, a hurt and pain I had never imagined possible. “Ponch wants to ask you a question,” said Jeclan. His friend looked so agitated that I looked quickly away. “I just want to know if you can help me transfer to a prison in Bangkok, Thailand,” said Pornchai with hostility.

I had, ironically, just finished reading a book — 4,000 Days — about the horror of life in a Bangkok prison. I told the young man that I would not help him do something that would only destroy him. “Who is this jerk?” he asked Jeclan. Weeks later, I was surprised to see that same young Asian man dragging a trash bag with his belongings into the housing unit where I lived. I approached him and said, “I’m glad you’re here.” He glared at me as though I were crazy.

We slowly became friends. I cannot really explain this long, slow, gradual building of trust with someone for whom trust is a deadly affair. I today know the courage it took for Pornchai to trust me. One day, his assigned cell mate came to me and said that he did not know what to do. He said that Pornchai had not spoken, eaten or even gotten out of bed for days.

I went to see Pornchai. He was known for having a short fuse, but I told him I would not leave until he got out of that bunk and spoke with me. I told him that I know what is under how he feels right now. I asked him to let me try to help him.

Some time later, his cell mate moved. Prison officials were cautious in imposing a new cell mate on Pornchai, so they told him to find someone he wanted to live with. He asked me and I said yes. It was early 2007. Over time, as trust developed, the story of Pornchai’s life was drawn out of him — de profundis — from out of the depths. It is a remarkable account that is now fully corroborated, and it is shocking.

From Thailand to Terror

Pornchai was born on September 10, 1973 near the village of Bua Nong Lamphu in the Northeast of Thailand beyond the city of Khon Kaen. His father was a Thai marshal arts fighter who earned a hard-won living traveling from town to town for bouts. He was sometimes away for long periods. When Pornchai was two years old, and his brother, Priwan, was four, their mother, Wannee, left telling them that she was going to the city. She did not return. The two boys were abandoned and stranded.

Their father came home weeks later to find Pornchai and Priwan foraging for food in the streets. Pornchai was hospitalized for severe malnutrition. When he left the hospital, his father was also gone, leaving them in the custody of another woman. She eventually put them out into the street where again they had to forage for food and shelter.

Learning of this, the extended family of Pornchai’s missing mother sent a 17-year-old uncle to search for the two boys and bring them to their small farm. Pornchai and Priwan grew up there raising rice, sugar cane, and water buffalo. They worked hard, but they were happy. Over time, Pornchai forgot his mother. He came to believe that his Aunt Mae Sin was his mother.

It was 1975 when Wannee left Pornchai and Priwan at ages two and four. She went to Bangkok to find work. While there she met Richard Bailey, an American military veteran and air traffic controller from Bangor, Maine who was a frequent visitor to Thailand. He brought Wannee to the United States.

Nine years passed. In 1985, when Pornchai was 11 years old, his mother, Wannee, suddenly reappeared in Thailand to claim her sons. Pornchai had no memory of her, and was traumatized to be taken away by a stranger. He never saw his home and family again. Wannee took Pornchai and Priwan to Bangkok for several months to await passports and travel documents. Pornchai turned 12 in Bangkok on September 10, 1985. Wannee told Pornchai and his brother that in America, they would never be hungry again.

In early December, 1985, they flew from Bangkok to Boston where Wannee’s husband, Richard Bailey, met them. On the long drive from Boston to Bangor, Pornchai and Priwan had their first meal in America at a McDonalds drive-thru. Both boys vomited the meal out the back seat windows of the car.

From the moment of their arrival in Bangor, the tone changed rapidly. Richard controlled their money, their speech, and their every move. The two boys and their mother were forbidden from speaking Thai in Bailey’s presence, and neither boy spoke or understood English.

Richard Bailey’s sister, who always treated Pornchai and Priwan with kindness, asked them what they wanted for Christmas. The boys did not know much about Christmas, but they understood that it involves presents. Pornchai’s adjustment had been traumatic. He asked for a watch and a teddy bear.

I caution you that from here on, this story may be difficult to read but please be brave for our friend who lived it. That night Pornchai was awakened from sleep and brought to a basement room by Richard Bailey. While there, Pornchai was forcibly raped by Bailey, an event that was to be repeated too many times to count. Pornchai was traumatized and terrified.

He did not understand what was being said, but its meaning was clear. If he resisted or told, the consequences to his mother would be severe. To demonstrate this, Bailey beat Wannee in the presence of both boys. When they tried to stop him, he beat them as well. They were treated as slaves.

Bailey then arranged separate bedrooms for the two brothers. Only much later did Pornchai learn that Bailey also raped his brother Priwan. In fear for each others’ safety, they both kept silent. They lived in a nightmare from which they saw no escape.

Witnesses who grew up in Bangor, and had read of Pornchai at this blog, have come forward with accounts of the 12-year-old who showed up at their homes traumatized, beaten and bloody. One man reports that he confronted Richard Bailey who later beat Pornchai again while forbidding him to interact with neighbors. Others have similar accounts. A school nurse reported his injuries. Nothing happened.

The first police intervention came when Pornchai was 13. He had run away, following railroad tracks out of Bangor. After a day or two, Richard Bailey reported him missing. Sheriff’s deputies pursued Pornchai through the woods and caught him. They did not understand his protests as they handed him back over to Bailey, but they filed a report alluding to their suspicions. Nothing happened.

Lost in America

By the time Pornchai was 14 in 1987, his brother, Priwan, traumatized and broken, fled Bangor. Pornchai was alone. He ran away again and again, and while evading police he lived for months on the streets of Bangor. For the second time in his life, he was forced to forage for food in the street. He also amassed a police record for stealing food, for truancy, and for being a chronic runaway.

At one point, Wannee asked Pornchai why he keeps running away. Pornchai broke down and told her in Thai what Richard Bailey had been doing to him. She warned Pornchai never to speak of this again. She said Bailey would beat her and then send her back to Thailand with no means to support them.

In the summer Pornchai lived in the woods, or under a downtown Bangor bridge (photo above) where his mother would sometimes bring him food. She held a job as a hotel maid arranged by Richard Bailey, but he tightly controlled her earnings. In the winter, Pornchai would sleep in vacant buildings or at times in the homes of friends whose parents’ welcome of him was at times generous but sometimes not. At 15, he was sentenced to reform school, the Maine Youth Center, and became a ward of the state.

While there, social worker Nancy Cochrane built some trust with Pornchai. When she learned of the severity of the physical and sexual violence he suffered, she filed a formal report with the Sheriff’s department. Deputies interviewed Richard Bailey, but no one else. Bailey convinced them that he heroically gave Pornchai a home in America and Pornchai made this whole story up. The deputies dropped the case without questioning Pornchai or his mother or brother or the social worker treating Pornchai.

The Maine Youth Center staff did not drop the matter so easily. They brought it to other authorities. During the investigation, Wannee visited Pornchai at the facility where he was held. She told him that the police questioned Bailey who then sent her to warn Pornchai to withdraw his claims. The implication — the truth of which Pornchai had already witnessed — was that Wannee would face Richard Bailey’s violence.

Fearing for his mother’s safety, Pornchai refused to cooperate further with the investigation. She was his only contact in both worlds, the nightmare he lived in America and the world he left behind in Thailand. He suffered in silence, consuming the injustices visited upon him like a toxin.

For many years, Pornchai believed that his mother chose to protect Bailey over him and Priwan. But at that moment Pornchai came to see that Wannee was as much a victim of Richard Bailey as he was. The evidence for that belief was still looming on the horizon.

State officials did not understand what was behind Pornchai’s silence. He was transferred to the Goodwill Hinckley School in Maine where he met Joe and Karen Corvino, foster parents who, for a brief period, became instrumental in his life. He later lost contact with them. Their tearful reunion with him came twenty years later when they discovered him by discovering this blog.

Pornchai did well at the Hinckley School. He excelled in Math and Soccer, and the Corvinos recognized the special child who had come to them. They considered legal adoption of Pornchai, but were told this would be difficult given that his biological mother still lived in Maine.

One day, at a soccer match with a rival school, a group of players realized that they could not win with Pornchai on the Hinckley team, so they targeted him for harassment. They pushed him, struck him, checked him, and he endured it all. Finally they shouted slurs about his mother. In seconds, all three of the larger boys were on the ground.

Pornchai was expelled from the game. The next day, over the strenuous objections of Joe and Karen Corvino, he was also expelled from the school. Joe and Karen had no choice but to put the 16-year-old alone on a bus to Bangor. They were told that a social worker would be at the other end but there was no one. At 16, Pornchai was again living on the streets. Sleeping in alleys and doorways, he began to carry a knife for protection.

Pornchai went in search of his brother, Priwan, and found him living in an Asian community in Lowell, Massachusetts. But because Pornchai was still a minor, authorities required that he return to Maine. He petitioned to be emancipated from being a ward of the state. At 17, Pornchai’s legal emancipation was processed by a reluctant Maine Youth Center staff.

The Fateful Day and the Loss of All Hope

At age 18, on March 21, 1992, Pornchai became intoxicated and the tragic offense that began this story took place. It was the last day Pornchai knew freedom, but in reality, his freedom had been taken from him six-and-a-half years earlier at age 12.

This is the context, the “why” that journalist Steve Kloehn asked in the Bangor Daily News at the end of Pornchai’s trial in 1992. Once charged, Pornchai was held without bail for months while awaiting trial in the Penobscot County Jail.

He was assigned a public defender. After a month, Wannee came to visit Pornchai once. Again sent by Richard Bailey, she pleaded with him to protect her by saying nothing of his past life. Convinced his mother was in danger, he again became silent, refusing to allow any defense that included an evaluation of his life. Under duress, he refused to participate in his own defense.

Pornchai’s brother, Priwan, told the public defender of the years of traumatic sexual and physical abuse, but Pornchai refused to discuss this and refused to allow the lawyer to raise it. He was never evaluated, and none of what happened to him became part of the court record. The judge mistook Pornchai’s silence for a defiant lack of remorse. Citing that he “had many opportunities in America but squandered them,” she sentenced 18 year-old Pornchai to 45 years in the Maine State Prison.

After the trial, Richard Bailey sold his Bangor home, took Wannee, and purchased land and a home on the U.S. Territorial Island of Guam in the Western Pacific. At age 18, alone and in prison, Pornchai was thousands of miles from his only contact with the outside world.

Eight years passed before he saw his mother again. She traveled to Thailand, and then to Maine to visit Pornchai in prison. She told him she was returning to Guam to finalize her divorce from Richard Bailey and financial settlements in the Guam courts. The year was 2000, Pornchai’s eighth year in prison.

To this day, the financial agreements ordered in the divorce decree have not been met. A cousin of Wannee in Thailand today reports that, upon her return to Guam, Wannee called her in 2000. Richard could be heard shouting in the background. The cousin states that Wannee cried that she is being threatened, and if she is found dead, she wants her cousin to demand an investigation.

Weeks later, Pornchai learned in prison that his mother had been murdered on the Island of Guam. He could learn no details except that it was filed as a homicide. The autopsy report indicates that she had been beaten to death and her body left on a beach. A Guam police report shows that Richard Bailey reported her missing, then the next day reported finding her body himself. No one has been charged. It remains today a “cold case” unsolved homicide in Guam.

This was a breaking point for Pornchai. He gave up, and ended up spending the next nearly seven years in and out of solitary confinement in Maine’s supermax prison. After seven years in hell, Pornchai was transferred to the New Hampshire State prison where we met. You know most of what followed, but not all. [Editor: WGBH-PBS Frontline’s documentary “Locked Up in America – Solitary Nation” depicts the nightmare of Pornchai’s solitary confinement. The prisoners you see were in solitary with him in adjacent cells. We’ve been having problems with the link, but this one to WGBH works well Frontline Solitary Nation.]

Once I learned the entire story, I could not let it go. I began several years ago to make discreet inquiries into Pornchai’s life in both Thailand and Maine. In 2007, shortly after we became friends and cell mates, a U.S. Immigration judge ordered that Pornchai is to be deported from the United States upon completion of his sentence. I assisted him in an appeal based on the severity of his life and his need for asylum, but to no avail.

I told Pornchai that we will need to build some connections in Thailand. He said that he did not even know where to begin. Pornchai felt overwhelmed, and took refuge in his imagined “Plan B” — his own final self-destruction. I challenged him to trust. A few years later, on Divine Mercy Sunday, 2010, Pornchai became a Catholic, and accepted my challenge to place his future in God’s hands with the guidance of his chosen Patron Saint, Maximilian Kolbe, whose name Pornchai chose as his own.

Then, Felix Carroll and Marian Press published Loved, Lost, Found with a beautiful chapter about Pornchai’s conversion. Felix graciously made the chapter available for posting. It made its way to Thailand where it moved many people in Bangkok to become involved in Pornchai’s story. A group called “Divine Mercy Thailand” organized to help bring him home. They have assured him of a home and support system when he returns.

Richard Alan Bailey at the time of his arrest on forty counts of felonious sexual assault.

A Day in Court

After being received into the Church, I convinced Pornchai to seek some treatment in the prison system. He was diagnosed with acute anxiety and severe Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He is working with a counselor and is prescribed a medication for acute anxiety and another to inhibit nightmares.

The inquiries I had been making produced some amazing results. Clare and Malcolm Farr, a husband/wife team from an intellectual property law firm in Perth, Australia had been reading Beyond These Stone Walls. Entirely pro bono, they immersed themselves in Pornchai’s story with overtures to the government of Thailand and the State of Maine. Clare Farr, one of the attorneys, has been in daily contact with us over the last three years.

Their tireless efforts gained the notice of the Thai Consulate in New York from where officials have since visited Pornchai and involved themselves in his plight. This story also gained the attention of law enforcement in the State of Maine from where an investigation was launched. Detectives from the Bangor police traveled to Concord, NH to interview Pornchai and also met with his brother, Priwan. An Assistant District Attorney came on the second interview.

In 2017, Richard Alan Bailey was indicted on forty felony counts of gross sexual misconduct for his well documented victimization of Pornchai and his brother. He was arrested at his West Lake, Oregon home and released on $49,000 cash bond. On September 12, 2018, the Feast of the Most Holy Name of Mary, Richard Bailey entered a plea of no contest but was found guilty and stands convicted of the charges. At this writing, the 2000 Guam case remains an open unsolved homicide.

Bailey’s sentence may bring the biggest gasp of all, forty-four years in prison, but all suspended, and eighteen years of supervised probation. He will not serve a day in prison. This was a hard truth for me. I am serving 67 years in prison for crimes that never took place, with a fraction of the charges faced by Richard Bailey and with none of the evidence. It is clear. He is not ‘Father’ Richard Bailey.

Covering this story for the Bangor Daily News, reporter Judy Harrison referred to Pornchai as “the now 45-year-old convicted killer.” Fully one third of her brief coverage of this story focused not on Richard Bailey’s crimes, but on Pornchai’s. Judy Harrison turned a deaf ear to the profoundly troubling serial victimization that his Victim Impact Statement describes.

The shallowness of reporters notwithstanding, Pornchai has also learned the ways of Divine Mercy. He learned them from me. In his submitted impact statement, he asked the court for justice but also for mercy for his tormentor, the very person who has haunted his nightmares for all these years. From Pornchai’s Victim Impact Statement presented in court:

“My brother has struggled with gambling and alcohol addictions and my mother is dead. Richard carried out more sexual assaults against me than there are current charges against him. His actions have robbed me of a normal life which I can never reclaim. Fortunately I have since had a lot of counseling and with the guidance of a wonderful Catholic priest I have found faith and a firm belief in God… I asked God to help me to forgive Richard and through my strong faith I have done this… I cannot forget what he has done but I do forgive him. The law must pass a just sentence, but I agree with the terms of this plea agreement.”

But there is something even more compelling in this story. Pornchai Moontri came to me, a Catholic priest whom he believes with all his heart to be innocent of the very things that stole his hope and his ability to trust. The irony sends me to my knees in thanksgiving for an opportunity. The most important mission of my life as a man and as a priest has been walking with Pornchai Moontri from dusk to dawn in his survival of the darkest night.

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Editor’s Note: Thank you for reading and sharing this important post. You may also like these related posts:

Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam by Fr Gordon MacRae

Pornchai Moontri and the Long Road to Freedom by Fr Gordon MacRae

Elephants and Men and Tragedy in Thailand by Pornchai Maximilian Moontri