Photo: AFP
Early risers who listen to WOR in the morning have heard Greg Giangrande, a human resources and communication leader, dispense helpful employment tips on the station for several years. Exactly one year ago, on April 23rd, 2024, Giangrande received the late-night phone call no parent wants to receive after his son Elias was killed along with a friend in a traffic accident in Thailand.
Elias Giangrande was a boat captain who was scouting locations for a diving company. A taxi veered into his friend’s scooter as Giangrande was trying to fix it on the side of the road. He was only 28 when his life was tragically cut short. Hearing that news over the phone was bad enough, but sadly, that was only part of the reason for the shock and anger the Giangrande family would experience in the coming days. Giangrande appeared on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program to warn potential Thai tourists about the ordeal he went through just to bring his son’s body back home.
As Giangrande told host Larry Mendte, the nightmare truly began a few minutes into the phone call: “After we got this call, we’re in shock. Immediately, we realized things were amiss. The Thai authorities blamed the boys without even conducting an investigation, despite the fact that the taxi driver admitted to speeding and didn’t receive so much as a summons. That all seemed really disturbing to us, but it got worse. When we arrived in Thailand to identify our son and bring him home, the local police…told me I needed to pay $10,000 US cash to the taxi driver and the scooter company for damages to the vehicles, and they said if I didn’t pay that they couldn’t release our son’s body... Extortion, plain and simple.”
Eventually, the US Embassy stepped in and helped him out, but Giangrande then found out just how dangerous Thailand is for tourists. “We discovered there are agencies in Thailand whose sole purpose- their sole function- is arranging the transport of dead tourists’ bodies back to their families around the world, and they’re busy 24-7. That is how dangerous these islands are.”
Worse yet, Giangrande found out that the U.S. State Department doesn’t even have a travel advisory for Thailand: “Our country has Thailand as the lowest level advisory, level one. Other countries, like the UK, Canada and Australia, they have high level travel warnings for Thailand. And… do you know that the U.S. travel advisory for the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Denmark, Sweden and other countries is level two- higher than Thailand! So that is unconscionable.”
The Giangrande family has created a foundation in Elias's name, dedicated to protecting others and raising awareness about travel safety: CaptainEliasTreasureChest.org
Photo Credit: Getty Images