Thai Buddhists Plan to Offer Emergency Aid

The Buddhist community that built the nation’s largest Thai temple in North Hollywood in 1979 is mounting emergency relief efforts for the Thai temple in Phoenix, where six monks and three others were mysteriously killed last weekend.

“We had very close links and visited with them all the time,” said the Venerable Sumana Tissa, one of 16 monks stationed at the Wat Thai Temple in the San Fernando Valley.

The temple is holding a meeting tonight for Thai leaders from around Southern California to plan emergency aid, including transportation of the bodies back to Thailand.

“We also will give moral support,” Tissa said. There is “so much grief” in the Phoenix temple community, he said.

The grisly discovery of nine bodies, some pierced with shotgun pellets but each shot execution-style once in the back of the head, was made Saturday when a Phoenix temple member brought in the morning meal.

In addition to six monks, who were from Thailand, the dead included an elderly nun and two young men.

The victims included 71-year-old Foy Sripanpiaserf and her 16-year-old grandson, Matthew Miller, who was to be ordained a monk Sunday. The rites were to be performed by Phra Thanchao Khun Whichien, abbot of the North Hollywood temple and highest ranking Thai Buddhist priest in the country.

The monks of the North Hollywood and Phoenix temples belonged to the same lineage in Thai Buddhism, the Mahanikai. The other line is called Thammayut, but the two religious traditions are essentially the same.

Offers of help have come not only from Los Angeles-area Thais, but from people in other Asian groups as well, according to Nampet Panichpant-Michelsen, one of the coordinators of the United Thai Council, an umbrella group based in Orange County.

“The Thai community is normally very responsive to needs, but usually the tragedies have been typhoons or other disasters in Thailand,” she said. “The shock of this event has mobilized people faster than ever before.”

Although there are small Thai Buddhist centers elsewhere in the region, she estimated that 70,000 to 100,000 Thai residents of Southern California have made the trip to visit the ornate Wat Thai Temple more than once since its dedication 12 years ago.

A communitywide memorial service will begin at 8 p.m. Saturday at the North Hollywood temple, although temple officials have asked representatives of other Buddhist groups and the public to arrive an hour early.

The temple will hold private rites earlier in the day.

Meanwhile, authorities in Arizona said neither a motive nor assailant in the crime was known. They sought information on a vehicle that was seen leaving the scene hours after the time of death.

Maricopa County Medical Examiner Heinz Karnitschnig said the victims were killed between 2 and 4 a.m. Saturday, about eight hours before the bodies were found.

Karnitschnig said four of the victims apparently had their hands raised above their heads when they were hit with blasts from a shotgun, but all were face down on the floor of the temple when they were killed by .22-caliber pistol shots to the head.

Other victims included the abbot, Pairuch Kanthong, and a 21-year-old acolyte, Chirasak, who had recently arrived from Thailand.