Death of Ohioan detained in N. Korea may remain mystery

A coroner said Wednesday her office could not determine what led to the fatal brain damage of a young Ohio man detained in North Korea for more than a year.

While the parents of 22-year-old Otto Warmbier and President Donald Trump have accused the North Korean government of torturing him, Dr. Lakshmi Sammarco said evidence has led to no “scientific facts” to solve Warmbier’s mysterious death.

“We don’t know what happened to him, and this is the bottom line,” she said. The cause of the death may never be known, she added.

A coroner’s report dated Sept. 11 shows the cause of death for the University of Virginia student as complications from brain-damaging oxygen deprivation through “an unknown insult more than a year prior to death.” The medical term for his condition was called “chronic anoxic/ischemic encephalopathy.” The manner of death was listed as “undetermined.”

While Warmbier’s family declined an autopsy, Sammarco said her office used extensive medical scanning and imaging for a “virtual autopsy” and that nothing more would have been gained by doing an autopsy so long after his brain damage occurred.

Warmbier’s parents told Fox News on Tuesday that North Korea tortured and “destroyed” him. Trump tweeted afterward: “Otto was tortured beyond belief by North Korea.” Trump’s tweet added to a series of recent accusations and heated exchanges between his administration and North Korean officials.

North Korea has denied mistreating Warmbier, who it sentenced to 15 years of hard labor in March 2016 for allegedly stealing a propaganda poster two months earlier. It has claimed Warmbier fell into a coma that resulted from botulism and a sleeping pill.

Sammarco agreed with University of Cincinnati Health system doctors who treated Warmbier and said they found no evidence of botulism or evidence of fractures or healing fractures that might point to beatings.