- Aussie boxing champ found next to UK boxer’s body in Thai hotel
- Police will interview Jayson Tonkin in Thai hospital
Australian boxing champion Jayson Tonkin – who is in a Thai hospital after being found in a hotel room next to the body of a dead 21-year-old British fighter – has a past full of drugs and crime.
As Thai police prepare to interview Tonkin and possibly charge him with offences which could put him in jail, a brutally honest interview about his hectic life as an ice addict can be revealed.
In a searing confession in March this year, Tonkin gave a raw and unfiltered account of his experiences with prostitutes, methamphetamine and other drugs, his addictions and being on the run from police.
In one dramatic account of being ‘hard on the meth’, he describes feeling paralysed for hours and in pain, as if someone is stomping on his head with steel boots and a ‘demonic’ woman’s voice whispering in his ear.
Tonkin, 27, was found at 12.10am on Wednesday in Room 2412 of the Vogue Hotel in the coastal Thai resort town of Pattaya alongside the body of fellow Muay Thai fighter, Joshua Goldstone.
According to Pattaya City Police, the two men were found in a room on the fourth floor of the hotel at 12.10am on Wednesday allegedly with ‘ketamine, cannabis and drug paraphernalia’ on the table.
Jayson Tonkin (centre) is pictured with 21-year-old UK fighter Joshua Goldstone (left) partying in Thailand last week before the Australian was found in a hotel room with the body of Goldstone, who died of a suspected drug overdose
Tonkin, 27, has regained consciousness and will be interviewed by Thai police, who may charge him over ketamine, possession of which in Thailand carries a penalty of up to five years
Hotel staff went to the room when they ‘heard a commotion’ on the top floor and found Tonkin allegedly ‘in a state of severe intoxication’ and ‘panicking and shouting‘ because Goldstone was lying face up and not moving.
Goldstone was shirtless and wearing black shorts and a waist bag. Thai police may have confused the two men’s passports or IDs, because Thai press reported that it was Jayson Tonkin who had died in the hotel room.
An image posted by Joshua Goldstone on his Instagram page last week shows him with Tonkin and three other men, possibly Thai nationals, partying with food and beer.
Four days before his death, Goldstone posted a video of himself and Tonkin on a bike with a load of cannabis plants, laughing and wheeling through the streets of Pattaya at night.
After it was initially reported that Tonkin was in a coma in a Pattaya intensive care unit, it appears he has now regained consciousness and could be charged with consumption and possession of ketamine, a ‘schedule 2 drug’.
The penalty if convicted is between one and five years in a Thai prison. Cannabis has been decriminalised in Thailand.
Tonkin, a middleweight Muay Thai fighter, opened up about his struggles with drugs – and in particular methamphetamine – in the podcast @TidesTalk, about mental health and addiction.
He said he moved to Bangkok, the ‘crazy sex capital of the world’ aged 15 with his father and ‘lost my virginity’ when ‘a prostitute at a club’ was picked out for him.
‘In Thailand you’ve got Russian prostitutes, Indian prostitutes all types of different prostitutes. You’ve got everything, mainly Thais, though.’
He was 17 when he smoked ‘my first joint’ and was soon ‘smoking 10 to 15 joints a day’, taking cocaine, and ‘sometimes I smoke weed before my fights’.
The body of UK boxer Joshua Goldstone is seen on the floor of the Pattaya hotel room where Tonkin was found allegedly screaming and intoxicated before he was taken to a Thai hospital
Tonkin (pictured in training in Hua Hin) was due to fight in November, but it is now uncertain if the 27-year-old will be free to compete
After becoming a Muay Thai fighter in Thailand, with the fight nickname ‘The Dingo’, he returned to Australia during the Covid pandemic.
He lived in a house with ‘a drug dealer, he sold coke, MDMA, that’s when I started learning what a bender was, two days without sleep’.
‘People I attract because of who I am as a fighter are pretty much gangsters,’ he tells podcasters Kahika Beckett, who is his cousin, and Chandu Grant.
‘Partying with The Dingo, have this line, have this pill, I was pretty much a guinea pig, that’s why I moved back to Thailand, falling down the rabbit hole.’
However, in Bangkok, ‘that’s when I got into meth for the first time. I had this trainer. I was staying in the ghetto, my room was only $100 a month’.
Living in Khlong Toei, a slum district in central Bangkok, Tonkin said his room ‘was the fun room and I had this trainer, he would smoke ice in my room with this little meth bong.
‘I’d be like, no, I’m not trying that, then one day I said, “F*** it, we’ll do it once and that’s that”. We kept sending this trainer off and back to get more and more.
‘I was up for four nights, my heart going crazy, and I hated it, I never wanted to do it again.’
But he did, and detailed a painful and terrifying hours-long experience ‘when I was getting real bad with the meth’.
‘I was starting to go hard with it, there was this one night. Usually when you have sleep paralysis you get it on your back, I used to get it in Thailand.
Jayson Tonkin is out of a coma in a Thai hospital ICU after being found next to the body of UK fighter Joshua Goldstone (right) in a hotel room in the resort town of Pattaya
Police and hotel staff are pictured inside Room 2412 after finding Tonkin
‘But I’m sleeping on my side and all of a sudden I wake up, but I’m still asleep.
‘I can’t move, I have heaps of pressure and weight on me and it feels like someone is stomping on my head, boom, boom, boom, like they had steel boots on, just going bang, bang, bang.
‘My jaw’s sinking in, the side of my head, my temple, my ear, everything’s crunching. I can feel the pressure, so much pain, and just like flashes of red, purple, black.
‘And it just went on for hours and then this just demonic female voice in my ear.’
Tonkin said during Covid, he ‘was pretty much having drugs every day. It was like $1500 straight on drugs, weed, a lot of prescription drugs like Valium, Xanax. Stuff like that.’
He said that he won his ‘comeback fight’ after the pandemic, but then got into trouble with the police when he and a friend ended up fighting a man ‘and beating him up real bad’.
Tonkin said his friend ‘took the rap’ and went to jail for 18 months, but police still pursued him and ‘I was hiding out in hotel rooms, police were looking for me’.
He said after that he had a relationship with a nurse, but that fell apart as his fighting career encountered hurdles and ‘it all started taking a really dark turn.
Jayson Tonkin recounts a dark tale about being ‘hard on the meth’ when he felt as if someone with steel cap boots was stomping on his head and a ‘demonic’ woman whispering in his ear
Tonkin’s fight against Muay Thai middleweight champion Tengnueng Sitjaesairoong (pictured together) might have to be abandoned
‘I was still doing the drugs, still pumping the prescriptions, doing really terrible stuff, being like demonic in my relationship, my ADHD kicking off – just going crazy, to be honest, just pretty much having a mental breakdown.
‘I was sort of just going deeper and deeper. I ended up trying to kill myself in my car, wrote my car off, ended up in the psyche ward, tried to stab myself … went really downhill.’
Tonkin eventually got back into training, and flew to Thailand last month for a fight against WBC Muay Thai middleweight champion Tengnueng Sitjaesairoong.
The fight was postponed due to monsoonal rain on the day, and rescheduled for November, although it looks like it will now be cancelled altogether.
Tonkin said on Instagram after arriving back in Thailand that: ‘I’m not really allowed to live here now. I get too lost in the madness.’
Tonkin (pictured with his mother Marisa) posted on Instagram that she is ‘the only person who will love me unconditionally and prays for me everyday’
But he said he had been living and training in Hua Hin, a ‘quiet’ beach town southwest of Bangkok.
He was found with alongside Mr Goldstone’s body in the more cosmopolitan metropolis Pattaya. Police are reportedly treating the death as a a drug overdose.
Jayson Tonkin has prior convictions in NSW for destroying property, blackening his face to commit an indictable offence and having custody of a knife in a public place.
On Goldstone’s Instagram page, people paid tribute to him, one person posting, ‘Fly high up there brother gone to soon’.
Pattaya Police Lieutenant Thanawi Yarangsi said that police had previously released incorrect information about the identity of the deceased, wrongly saying it was Tonkin who had died.
A police spokesman added: ‘We have taken photos of the scene and collected all evidence. We believe he may have died from a drug overdose based on what we found in the room. We will question his friend further when he is conscious.’