This is an emaciated Richard Hewitt before being rescued from a Pattaya police cell where he lay naked and cuffed to the cell bars in what witnesses described as a state near to death.
And this is Richard Hewitt today.
He has made an incredibly recovery after treatment at a psychiatric hospital in Bangkok. And remarkably it was a private British citizen who came to his aid after seeing pictures of Hewitt up on this website.
The British Embassy had seemingly written him off as either a ‘feckless’ Brit or perhaps as one Embassy employee apparently described him, unofficially and not without cause - ‘a nutter’.
But now his faculties have returned and Hewitt describes himself as ‘The luckiest man in the world’
And from a world in which he thought he had no cash he has emerged to a world where he is rich well beyond the imagination of his paranoiac alter ego with many millions of Thai baht in his bank account.
He puts his good fortune down to his saviour Tracy Cosgrave, of the charity Melissa Cosgrave Children’s Foundation, who rushed down to Pattaya Police station, had him dressed and fed and persuaded police to send him to a psychiatric hospital.
He is also deeply grateful to his landlord Bunchai Thaiurungrattana at his apartment in Pattaya 3rd Road, Soi 16, who safeguarded his belongings, cash and bank books, until he made his recovery.
For Richard Hewitt is not a Pattaya Brit who has squandered all his cash on booze, women, and drugs… Well, at least not yet.
He is in fact wealthy in his own right. A computer engineer, and graduate from the University of Sheffield, he has in fact lived in Thailand for on and off for 12 years and says he has visited ‘and stayed in’ 56 provinces.
He was an English language teacher for Berlitz in Bangkok until four years ago when he quit after his father died and he received a large inheritance.
And it is that inheritance which may have been his undoing. That and perhaps moving to Pattaya with little sense of self control.
“I decided someone would have to make me a pretty good offer if I was ever going to work again,” he said, talking about his inheritance. “That was my downfall”.
Instead he decided to make most of his life in a city once described by Britain’s ‘Observer’ as a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah.
Hewitt, 47, from Brownhills, Birmingham, drank, took drugs, and frequented the city’s sex bars.
His last arrival date from Britain was in the third week of August last year. He resumed his normal lifestyle but insists he quit drugs, and drink by early October.
Nevertheless the damage appeared to have been done. Something somewhere cracked, and he has now only partial memory of what happened. Doctors put it down to paranoiac psychosis.
He does remember dreaming about water, ‘Rain making’ and ‘Rain Dancing’, so much so that he turned on all the taps to flood his apartment and others in the block and he became delirious turning his room into an open toilet.
He scratched around looking for food, oblivious of the US$2000. 200 pounds sterling, 3000 baht and bank books in his safe. [more...]
Full story: http://www.andrew-dr...tory-revisited/
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