I Go Back to Asia

My last post was about the nonsensical arson and witness-tampering charges against Sandra Couture reported in the media on August 1, 2012, and her “confession” to those charges, reported on April 1, 2013. 

****Note written on August 3, 2018: I have deleted most of this original blog post as I feel it was not really directly connected to the Trina Langenbrunner case. I'll just leave the next paragraph as a summary of where I was in 2014, as I was writing the original blog.

However, in August 2014, I very happily got a full-year contract for full-time work, as an English instructor at the English Department of the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Science of NPU. I teach 2 writing courses to 3 groups of 3^rd-year English Majors. I teach 6 sessions per week, with about 45 students per class. I’m receiving very good pay, more than I’ve ever made in my life, and I’m quite happy with the job. It’s quite taxing, and hasn’t allowed me much time to work on this blog over the past couple of months, but it is very enjoyable work.  The Faculty even provides a driver who picks me up and brings me back to my apartment!
The students think it’s funny that I speak to them and explain the lessons in Lao. Though Lao is understood here, it’s considered a non-standard dialect in Thailand. The students aren’t supposed to speak it in school, any more than American kids are supposed to use “brang” and “brung” or “ain’t” in school. Then here comes the teacher, speaking Lao! I am working on my Thai, and can read it, very slowly. I’m much more fluent in Lao, however.

Well, in the next post I will relate my very unpleasant experience with writing to Trina Langenbrunner’s daughter, Shelly Tormanen, in March 2013. I was in Cambodia, waiting for word on my visa, trying to relate my testimony concerning her mother’s murder. I had spent a fair amount of effort copying and pasting the same letters I’ve put into this blog onto a USB drive, carrying them to Cambodia, finding a half-way reliable Internet connection, and trying to send them to Cloquet, from Phnom Penh.
(My own computer had been left in Laos, so the only access I had to a computer for the first several months I was in Thailand was to rent one per hour in Internet cafes. Fortunately, my fiancée had brought me my external hard-drive, or all of my files would have been lost, in addition to everything else I had lost in Laos.)
During that time in March 2013 I was actually feeling “iffy” concerning my own physical survival, and I wanted the story I’ve been telling in this blog on record, somewhere, at least. I thought that certainly Trina Langenbrunner’s daughter would be interested in any witness testimony concerning her mother’s murder. I didn’t expect to be insulted, accused, and threatened, but that’s exactly what I got for my efforts, from her. In the next post I’ll publish the actual messages I received.
And, in about two posts from now, I will begin telling of my correspondence with Ron Taggart from the Public Defender’s Office, and the strange reactions I got from that Office. 
Please stay tuned.