The video lasted only a few seconds, but it was enough to stop scrolling thumbs across Indonesian social media this weekend: a young girl standing in a crowd, calling out to her father, who could no longer hear her.
Her father was KD, the man beaten to death by a mob in Baturiti, Tabanan, after allegedly being caught stealing a fighting rooster. His youngest daughter, still in elementary school, was filmed sobbing beside his body, a moment that has since traveled far beyond the village where it happened, and has put a human face on a story that, until this week, had largely been reported in the clinical language of police statements.
A Village Chief’s Blunt Message
I Made Sutama, head of Sidatapa Village in Buleleng Regency, where KD was originally from, didn’t mince words when reflecting on his fellow resident’s death. Whatever wrongdoing someone is accused of, he said, the response should always go through the courts, not a crowd.
“If someone is guilty, report it to the authorities. Don’t take the law into your own hands to the point of taking someone’s life, just because of a stolen chicken,” Sutama told detikBali when contacted on Saturday, July 25, 2026.
“Our country is a country of law. Let the proper authorities handle it. We shouldn’t have members of the same community killing each other over something like this,” he added.
A Family Left Behind
Sutama said KD’s family has come to accept his death, however painful, and has placed their trust in police to handle the investigation. But the human cost of that acceptance is difficult to overstate: KD leaves behind a wife and three children. His eldest is already married; his second child has just started high school; his youngest is in the first grade of elementary school.
It was Sutama himself who traveled to collect KD’s body. “There are three children. The eldest is already married, the second just started 10th grade, and the youngest is in first grade. I was the one who went to collect the body yesterday. When we arrived home and I saw his child sobbing uncontrollably, I felt genuinely heartbroken,” he said.
That moment, the youngest daughter’s grief captured on camera and shared widely online, has become the image most associated with the case, more so than the crime KD was accused of, or the mob that killed him.
A Case Still Under Investigation
KD died after allegedly being caught stealing a fighting rooster in Banjar Dinas Juwuk Legi, Batunya Village, Baturiti District, Tabanan. His motorbike was also reportedly set on fire by residents during the incident. Police say they are continuing to investigate the full sequence of events.
Sutama’s message, delivered from a village several hours away from where the killing took place, was less about the specifics of this one case and more a plea aimed at preventing the next one: that no theft, however frustrating or repeated, justifies a life taken outside the law.
Why This Story Resonates Beyond Bali
For international readers, the viral image of a grieving child beside her father’s body cuts through language and cultural distance in a way police reports rarely do. It’s a reminder that behind every headline about mob violence, chicken theft, or vigilante justice, in Bali or anywhere else, there are children who will grow up defined by a single, devastating morning, and a community left to reckon with what happened, and why no one stepped in before it was too late.
