Fatal Myanmar maid abuse: Woman and mother had planned to send victim home

SINGAPORE - The mother of a woman who

abused a maid to death

said that one month before the domestic helper died, she and her daughter were planning to terminate her contract and send her back home to Myanmar.

Prema S. Naraynasamy, 64, told the court on Wednesday that the work performance of Ms Piang Ngaih Don had stressed her daughter Gaiyathiri Murugayan so much the latter wanted to jump off a building with her two children.

Gaiyathiri’s former husband, Kevin Chelvam, was also aware of the situation, said Prema, who is serving 17 years’ jail for her role in the fatal abuse of the 24-year-old maid.

She returned to court on Wednesday, the seventh anniversary of the death of Ms Piang Ngaih Don, to testify in the trial of Chelvam.

Chelvam, a 40-year-old police staff sergeant who has been suspended, is claiming trial to four charges. These include voluntarily causing hurt and abetment of voluntarily causing grievous hurt to Ms Piang Ngaih Don by starvation, and removing evidence of the abuse in the form of a closed-circuit television (CCTV) recorder.

Chelvam and Gaiyathiri divorced in 2020 and have two children, aged one and four at the time.

Ms Piang Ngaih Don started working for Chelvam’s family in May 2015 and died on July 26 the following year after prolonged abuse while under his employment.

Prema said her daughter had issues with Ms Piang Ngaih Don, whom she referred to as Don, as early as September 2015, after Chelvam’s lawyer Pratap Kishan highlighted a message sent by Gaiyathiri that suggested so. Prema said she could not remember when her daughter said she was facing the mental torture, but that it would happen quite often.

“With the maid, she (Gaiyathiri) felt like she was going to go crazy. She felt very stressed. She (the maid) never did anything properly,” she said.

Prema said she and her daughter would have to repeat instructions several times, and that Ms Piang Ngaih Don would take several hours to finish a task.

Prema appeared in court in a purple jumpsuit, wearing handcuffs, spectacles and a mask. Her shoulder-length hair had white streaks. She spoke in Tamil via a translator, whom she kept her gaze on during most of the proceedings.

Prema said she had taken Ms Piang Ngaih Don to her son’s flat in Hougang on multiple occasions to relieve her daughter of the stress allegedly caused by the maid. On one occasion, she stayed for a week.

Following this, Prema and her daughter decided to send Ms Piang Ngaih Don home, with Prema saying that they should not hire another maid, given the trouble they had allegedly faced with Ms Piang Ngaih Don.

According to Prema, Gaiyathiri made Ms Piang Ngaih Don call her sister in Myanmar to inform her that they were planning to send her back. Prema added that Ms Piang Ngaih Don said she did not want to go home. In response, Prema told the maid to go back home and see a doctor as she was eating a lot and was still losing a lot of weight, and that seeing doctors in Singapore was expensive.

Prema said that Ms Piang Ngaih Don finally agreed, adding that she could not recall when she had the conversation with her, but it was the time when the maid got really thin.

Based on her observation, she said Ms Piang Ngaih Don would eat well and she was a good eater.

Prema said that when she and Ms Piang Ngaih Don went out for meals together she would buy roti prata for the maid, and that she would get chicken briyani with extra rice for her, which the maid would finish eating.

She added that she and her daughter did not control the portions for Ms Piang Ngaih Don, and she would eat the same food as the rest of the family.

The maid weighed 39kg when she started working for Chelvam’s family and

was a mere 24kg when she died at the age of 24.

A senior consultant forensic pathologist said on Monday that her body mass index when she died was similar to that of someone suffering from advanced cancer or from extensive and widespread tuberculosis.

Gaiyathiri, 43, was

 sentenced in June 2021 to 30 years in prison

 – the longest jail term meted out in a maid abuse case in Singapore.

Prema, who joined her daughter in the abuse, was

sentenced to 14 years’ jail in January.

She was given three more years’ jail in June after admitting to one charge of instigating Chelvam to cause evidence of the offences in their Bishan flat to disappear, bringing her total jail term to 17 years.

In response to a question from Mr Pratap, Prema told the court that her relationship with Chelvam at the time of the abuse was like that of mother and son. She said that between January and July 2016, she would stay at Chelvam and Gaiyathiri’s Bishan flat two or three days a week, from Tuesday afternoon to Friday afternoon. On rare occasions, she would stay longer.

“I mostly stayed to take care of the children, but I also felt the maid was giving Gaiyathiri a lot of issues,” she said, adding that her daughter was also not feeling very well at that time.

According to her, Gaiyathiri had trouble sleeping as her children would usually cry at night. She added that her daughter would take 10 to 12 Panadol Extra caplets a day and complained of migraine.

When Mr Pratap asked how her interaction was with Ms Piang Ngaih Don in 2016, Prema said they were quite close and would go out and have breakfast and buy groceries.

“Your Honour, myself and her, we were close. When she made a mistake, I would get really angry. Usually, I am not like that, your Honour, I am not that kind of person. (But) whenever she did any wrong, it made me really angry,” she said.

The trial continues on Thursday.