Berry Smith spent a vacation with tsunami victim Dave Sammann a week and a half before the Christmas Day disaster struck. “I bumped into him there in April, and visited Dave three times this year,” said the Wailua Homesteads resident
Berry Smith spent a vacation with tsunami victim Dave Sammann a week and a half before the Christmas Day disaster struck.
“I bumped into him there in April, and visited Dave three times this year,” said the Wailua Homesteads resident who is a sales manager at Banyan Harbor Vacation Club in Nawiliwili. He left Thailand on Dec. 14.
Smith said Sammann died attempting to save the life of a Thai man named Nutt. Nutt and his girl friend Um were working for Sammann at his new house site on the beach at Khao Lak in southwest Thailand. “Dave tried to save him and a second wave came and slammed into his pickup truck.”
He said Sammann’s wife Ooy was in Southern California when the tsunami hit, helping launch a Thai restaurant. The couple’s daughter Mai also survived.
Ironically Sammann had left Kaua‘i to avoid a disaster.
“‘The reason I left Kaua‘i’,” Smith said Sammann had told him, “‘was that I went through Hurricane ‘Iniki and didn’t want to go through another hurricane.”
Sammann is the former owner of the Princeville-based North Shore Cab company, and moved to Thailand about three and a half years ago after living on Kaua‘i for 17 years.
“Dave was a great guy, a great family man,” Smith said. “He was busy building this house and had another property he was going to build a restaurant on.”
He said Khao Lak is located about 45 miles north of Phuket, the popular Thai resort area, which was planned to be the next “big resort area in Thailand…a five-star resort area.”
“Dave was the only person building along that stretch of beach,” Smith said.
He said Sammann was popular among the residents of the area, and was teaching English to students at a nearby college. Smith said the attraction for Sammann and other Americans who have moved to Thailand was the Thai way of life: “It’s simplier…it’s the land of the $5 massage and $2 dinner. You can rent a nice place for $200-$300, and money goes further. It’s the land of smiles, people are very warm.”
“For me the sad thing is that I spent 3 months there this year, and met great people, and I’m sure they are all dead,” Smith said. “It was kind of a wipe out of a lot of great memories.”
