A devastated family are searching for answers after the body of a young British tourist was found in the sea off a Thai beach – hours after he was seen running away from a bar where he had met with an unknown man.
Regan Kelly, 28, had just arrived in Thailand for a month-long trip when he went missing in the early hours of January 3.
The building surveyor from Selsdon, south London, was last seen in CCTV footage at the bar of the Mad Monkey Hostel, where he was staying on the paradise island of Phuket.
The footage shows him talking to a man, who also looked like a tourist but who was not staying at the hotel, for several hours before the conversation began to get ‘increasingly heated’, Regan’s family said.
‘We are not too sure what they were talking about, but the conversation seemed a bit confrontational,’ his sister Laurie Blackall told . ‘There’s no audio but Regan looked visibly upset.’
She said that her brother then got up and left abruptly, heading towards Patong beach, before the man followed him seconds later.
Security camera footage from a hotel closer to the seafront then showed Regan running, with the unknown man following him some 15 seconds after, she said. The video, shared with the family by police, then cuts off.
At 10am the next day, a watersports instructor found a naked body face down in the water off Patong. Police sent photos to Regan’s family, who had reported him missing, and his identity was confirmed.
Laurie and her father are now in Thailand trying to piece together what happened to her brother in his final hours, and what he had spoken about with the mystery man – thought to be the last person to have seen him alive.
The family are also desperately trying to get Regan home, and have launched a fundraiser to help bring his body back to the UK so a second post mortem can be carried out.
‘The detective said he has worked tirelessly but I just don’t know if they want to make it out like it was a tragic accident,’ Laurie said. ‘Don’t get me wrong, it could have been an accident, but something is really not sitting right with me.’
Regan had messaged his sister and dad regularly since he landed on December 30, sharing pictures of what he was getting up to and letting them know he was safe and well.
So when they didn’t hear from him on January 3, she said, they knew something was wrong and reported him missing.
Regan had been wearing shorts, a Mad Monkey t-shirt, black baseball cap and a cross-body bag fastened ‘very tightly’ over his chest when he was seen running towards the beach.
But nothing was on his body and none of his clothes or belongings could be found on the beach, his sister said, with his phone also still missing.
‘Our main focus is getting him home ASAP and continuing to work out what happened, because for us there isn’t any closure, this isn’t a closed case,’ Laurie said.
She describes the man who followed her brother as looking like another tourist, rather than a local, wearing a white t-shirt and shorts and being ‘muscly’.
‘I would like to appeal to this guy and for him to tell us what was said, I want to ask why Regan seemed so upset,’ she said.
‘Maybe he was just having a passionate conversation, talking about life… Judging by what we saw, they could have been having a very deep conversation.
‘But it seems like it was getting heated towards the end – no physical altercations more verbal.’
She added that she was ‘surprised’ to see her brother getting upset in the video. ‘He’s in paradise and he’s worked so hard to get there and it wasn’t like him to be heated like that,’ she said.
She described Regan as ‘very sociable and someone who would talk to everyone,’ and said he was an experienced traveller who had visited south east Asia before.
‘He’s not a reckless party boy – he’s come out here to have a nice time, but he was meant to be out here for a month backpacking and seeing sights rather than partying like lots of people come for,’ she said.
‘He’s a professional he’s not a lager lout, he’s not out here to cause trouble he’s out here to make friends and network and socialise.’
She described her brother as ‘mature’ for his age and as ‘the most beautiful person’ who would be missed by his friends and colleagues.
‘He’s a qualified building surveyor going to be so badly missed by his team, they rely on him on site. He had an old head on young shoulders.’
Regan’s cousin Larysa said that his death was an ‘absolutely devastating’ loss to his family.
‘He was such a lovely man, just a great person. He had such a big smile and his laugh was so loud, he was always laughing. It has broken us all that he’s gone.
She added that the 28-year-old was ‘the youngest cousin out of us all’, and that she couldn’t imagine her cousin Laurie’s pain at ‘losing her baby brother’ just a few years after the pair lost their mum.
Thai authorities have said Regan’s official cause of death was drowning, but his family now want the opinion of a British coroner.
‘We want him to be examined properly. You don’t know how thorough they are,’ Laurie said. ‘We just want to get him home, but we need to raise the funds to get him home.’
Regan is understood to have not had travel insurance, meaning his family is now having to foot the large bill to get him back to London.
Regan’s family say his death is just the latest in a series of tragedies they have faced in recent years, having lost his three uncles in 2023 and his mother in 2016.
The family have launched a JustGiving page to help cover the cost of repatriating his body and for his funeral, which can be found here.