2016 case of a Myanmar maid abused to death in Singapore
On the morning of 26 July 2016, Burmese maid Piang Ngaih Don (13 June 1992 – 26 July 2016) was found tortured, starved and beaten to death in a flat in Bishan, Singapore.
Her killers were Prema S. Naraynasamy, an elderly woman, and her daughter, Gaiyathiri Murugayan. Both women, the latter of whom employed the deceased maid, were arrested and charged with murder in relation to the death of the maid. A third accomplice, Kevin Chelvam, Gaiyathiri's husband and a police officer, was found to be allegedly involved in the maid abuse and to have allegedly removed evidence of the maid abuse in order to prevent his mother-in-law and wife from being punished by the authorities.
Five years after Piang was murdered, Gaiyathiri was the first to stand trial, and she was sentenced to 30 years’ imprisonment for a reduced charge of culpable homicide and other hurt-related charges on 22 June 2021. Gayathiri's mother Prema, whose murder charge was temporarily withdrawn, was sentenced to a total of seventeen years in prison in the first half of 2023 for her remaining other charges of maid abuse and removing evidence of the maid abuse. Since July 2023, Chelvam was undergoing trial for his abuse of Piang, and he was suspended from the police force in light of his criminal conduct.
The death of the maid shocked the public in Singapore given the extensive physical mistreatment of the maid, who was also said to have been starved and not given any time to rest. This also alarmed the government who decided to review and implement new policies to monitor the welfare of all foreign maids.
Early life of the victim.
Born on 13 June 1992, Piang Ngaih Don was the daughter of two farmers residing in a rural village known as Dimpi Village, which was part of the Tedim Township in Chin State, one of the poorest states in Myanmar. The village has a population of about 1,500 people, and it is located in a mountainous area. The only route to the place was a four-hour drive on a muddy road from Kalay Township.
When Piang was four years old, her unnamed parents died within a year of each other, most likely between 1996 and 1997. Piang also has ten siblings, including an older brother Pau Sian Mung (b. 1983 or 1984) and an older sister Ciang Lam Man. Five of her siblings died before Piang herself died in Singapore, leaving only her older brother Pau and two of her sisters (including Ciang) and two other siblings of unconfirmed gender left alive at the time of her death.
Piang and her siblings were raised Catholic. The orphaned Piang and her surviving siblings used the farmland left behind by their late parents to make a living for themselves. Piang only studied up to Grade 9 in school, before she left at age 15. In the early 2010s, Piang first met her lover and later became pregnant with his child, but the lover left her while she was still carrying her unborn child. In around February 2013, Piang gave birth to her first and only child, a son named Mung Lam Tuang. A fellow villager and neighbour who worked in Singapore described Piang as a "quiet" individual who was close to her family.
As an adult, Piang took up a job as a construction worker, but she quit as the salary was low and she wanted to earn more to support her family, after hearing from some other villagers that the wages of employment in Singapore were higher.
Employment and abuse.
Preparations and employment.
Having heard about the higher income she could get from jobs in Singapore, Piang prepared to go there so that she could provide a better life for her son and family. She was said to have planned to work there as a domestic maid for two to three years, as she wanted to buy a plot of land to build a house for herself and her son in Kalay Township.
However, at the point of time she decided to leave Myanmar for Singapore, Piang was still two months shy of reaching 23 years old, the legal minimum age of working as a domestic maid in Singapore. Since she was not yet 23, Piang would have been ineligible to take up the job in Singapore. However, Piang staked out her money for her agent, who bribed an immigration officer from Yangon to change her date of birth to 13 April 1992, exactly two months earlier than her real birth date, and the change was completed when Yangon authorities first issued Piang's passport on 11 April 2015. This allowed Piang to look like she was minimally old enough to become a maid in Singapore, and she first arrived in Singapore in May 2015.
When this information was revealed after Piang's eventual death at the hands of her employers, there was no capture made by the authorities as both the agent and officer were never identified or found.
After she arrived in Singapore, Piang, then 22 years old, was hired by a family living in Bishan. Piang's employer was Gaiyathiri Murugayan, a 35-year-old housewife who was married to Kevin Chelvam, a 37-year-old police staff sergeant from the Singapore Police Force. Gaiyathiri had two children, a four-year-old daughter and an infant son, and her elderly mother Prema S. Naraynasamy, aged 57, lived with her in the same flat at Bishan. There were also two tenants living at the flat. Piang was the fifth maid to work for the Bishan household after four previous domestic workers, and her first day of work began on 28 May 2015.
Abuse.
During her term of employment, Piang faced a series of harsh and abusive treatments from her employer and her family, which started soon after she worked for the family. Firstly, Piang was not allowed to have a mobile phone or at least a day off every week. Gaiyathiri was said to have disliked the maid for being unhygenic, too slow and eating too much. She set a series of harsh rules to force Piang to obey. Gaiyathiri would shout when she felt Piang was being disobedient. This escalated to physical abuse five months later in October 2015.
The physical abuses were inflicted upon Piang almost daily, often several times a day. The CCTV cameras, originally set by Chelvam to monitor his two children and his maid, had captured most of the physical abuse that occurred in the last month before Piang died. The retrieved footage showed Gaiyathiri pouring cold water on Piang, slapping, pushing, punching, kicking her and stomping on her while the maid was on the floor. She also used objects like a plastic bottle or metal ladle to assault Piang, and pulled her hair while lifting her off from the floor and shaking her violently. She also burned Piang with a heated iron and choked her. At one point, such abuses happened in the presence of Gaiyathiri's infant son, who was playing games at one side while Piang was subjected to physical torture nearby.
Aside from that, the maid was also deprived of food and rest. She was only allowed to sleep five hours a day, and she was only allowed to eat sliced bread soaked in water, cold food straight from the refrigerator or some rice at night. She was told to do her chores wearing multiple layers of face masks due to Gaiyathiri finding her unhygienic. Piang was also forced to use the toilet with the toilet door open. Other than Gaiyathiri, Prema was Piang's other major abuser. Chelvam had also used a bat at one point to hit Piang.
When Piang was examined by doctors during her two medical check-ups, which took place six and 10 months after her employment, the doctors found that something was amiss as they found scars and bruises on Piang's body. Each time, Piang's employers passed it off by saying that Piang was too clumsy and often fell down. Piang's employment agency also spoke with her on two separate occasions, but nothing abnormal was reported. Chelvam, who gave his feedback to the MOM about his maid's conduct and working performance, often rejected the offers made by MOM to replace her with another maid.
Death.
Despite not having a mobile phone, Piang managed to make a phone call five times to her family members in Myanmar. During her first four phone calls, Piang never complained to them about her job. However, in her fifth phone call made on 12 July 2016, Piang told her family that she wanted to go home as she was not feeling well. This would be the last time Piang would speak to her family members. Shortly after she called her family, Piang was tied to the window grille at night while she slept on the floor. This went on for the final 12 days of her life, in addition to the abuse she suffered daily.
On the night of 25 July 2016, Gaiyathiri and Prema had beaten up Piang and tied her hand to a window grille before leaving her on the floor. They also poured water on her. Piang was said to have pleaded for mercy, but Gaiyathiri said she deserved it for allegedly stealing food from the refrigerator. The next day, at 5 am, Gaiyathiri also kicked and stomped on Piang's head and neck area, grabbed her by the hair and pulled her head back such that her neck extended backwards twice, and choked Piang, who was, by this time, unresponsive to her assaults. Gaiyathiri believed she simply did not want to wake up.
At around 7.30 am, after Chelvam left for work, Piang was found motionless on the floor. Both Prema and Gaiyathiri tried to revive her but failed. At the suggestion of Prema, a doctor was contacted. Gaiyathiri called the clinic between 9.30am and 9.45am and asked for a house call. She lied to the nurse that she found the victim on the kitchen floor. She also declined to call for an ambulance and insisted that a doctor come over. While they waited for a doctor, the two women changed Piang's wet clothes with clean ones.
At 10.50 am, the clinic doctor, Dr Grace Kwan, arrived at the Bishan flat to tend to Piang. She told the women that Piang was dead. Both women were shocked and they quickly lied that Piang had moved minutes earlier. Dr Kwan called an ambulance, and 40 minutes later, the paramedics arrived, pronouncing the 24-year-old Piang dead. The cause of her death was hypoxic ischaemic encephalopathy with severe blunt trauma to her neck. An autopsy by forensic pathologist Dr George Paul revealed that she had suffered multiple injuries - precisely 31 recent scars and 47 external injuries - and she was so emaciated and undernourished that she would have died of starvation if the ill-treatment had been prolonged. Another contributing factor was that the choking by Gaiyathiri had led to the brain being deprived of oxygen and led to Piang's death. As a result of excessive starvation, Piang was found to have lost nearly 38% of her weight, only weighing 24 kg when she died.
During her court appearance in 2023, Dr Kwan stated that Piang was so severely underweight that it was like skin wrapping up the bones of her limbs. Similarly, Dr Paul also said that the BMI index of Piang was about 11, indicating that she was severely malnourished, and at such a low BMI index, something only apparent to those with TB or advanced cancer, Piang's life would have been endangered, and her low intake of nutrition compounded her inability to tolerate the repeated abuse and trauma.
Arrest of the suspects.
Capture and charges.
After the death of Piang, both Gaiyathiri, then 36, and her mother Prema, then 58, were immediately arrested by the police. The mother-daughter pair arrived at the state courts of Singapore, where they were charged with first-degree murder under the Penal Code. If found guilty, both Gaiyathiri and Prema would be sentenced to death by hanging (all four degrees of murder in Singapore are considered capital offences). Many neighbours were said to be shocked over their arrest. One neighbour said that she did not hear anything amiss the night before, and another remembered the maid as a polite girl. A third noted that she looked thin.
Later, investigations also led to the arrest of