51-year-old Chawi Borders lived in Waddell, Arizona, just northwest of Phoenix. She was a Thai

Buddhist who had married an American Air Force servicemen, and when she moved to the area in

1976, she started attending the Wat Promkenarum Temple. On the morning of Saturday, August 10th,

1991, she and a friend,, Premchit Hash, went to the

temple to cook lunch for the monks. They planned on making rice and vegetables for the monks they

expected to be there that day. The women attempted to enter through the front door, but it was

locked. Premchit went around the back of the building and entered through a door near the kitchen.

She set her grocery bags down in the kitchen and went to unlock the front doors for Chawi.

As the women went back out to get more supplies from the car, they saw the monks lying on the floor

silent.

Assuming they were praying, Chawi and Pramchik continued preparing lunch, and just before the meal was ready, the phone rang.

Chawi tried to answer the phone by the kitchen and immediately noticed that the cord between the

phone and the receiver had been cut. That's when she looked into the room where the

monks were laying and realized something was wrong. There were nine people laying in a circle,

but one of them was the temple's only resident none. It was forbidden for the monks and none to lie

together, so Chawi approached the group for a closer look. That's when she saw the pools of

blood. Chawi returned to the kitchen and told Premshit that they needed to get help. Not stopping to

put their shoes back on, they ran barefoot to the car and went to a nearby house. By the time

Joe Ledgwig opened his front door, the two women were hysterical and he couldn't

really understand what was going on. He gathered that there was an emergency at the temple, so he

jumped into his white Ford pickup truck and went to the place of worship to investigate.

Once inside, he saw what would later be described as a mass execution.

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