American student imprisoned in North Korea dies
Warmbier had been in coma since returning to U.S. last week
“You can tell from the outpouring of emotion from the communities that he touched ... that the love for Otto went well beyond his immediate family.” Statement from OttoWarmbier’s parents, Fred and Cindy Warmbier
No other outcome was possible.
That’s the message in a brief statement issued Monday by Otto Warmbier’s family.
Warmbier, 22, was imprisoned for a year and a half in North Korea. He finally made it home this past week, but he was in a coma. Doctors described his condition as a state of “unresponsive wakefulness.”
At 2:20 p.m. ET on Monday, he died.
“It would be easy at a moment like this to focus on all that we lost — future time that won’t be spent with a warm, engaging, brilliant young man whose curiosity and enthusiasm for life knew no bounds,” reads a statement from parents Fred and Cindy Warmbier.
“But we choose to focus on the time we were given to be with this remarkable person. You can tell from the outpouring of emotion from the communities that he touched — Wyoming, Ohio, and the University of Virginia to name just two — that the love for Otto went well beyond his immediate family.”
President Trump and wife Melania offered condolences to the Warmbier family in a statement released Monday by the White House. “Otto’s fate deepens my Administration’s determination to prevent such tragedies from befalling innocent people at the hands of regimes that do not respect the rule of law or basic human decency,” the statement read.
The Warmbiers thanked supporters for their thoughts and prayers and the professionals at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center who cared for their son.
“Unfortunately,” they wrote, “the awful torturous mistreat- ment our son received at the hands of the North Koreans ensured that no other outcome was possible beyond the sad one we experienced today.”
The death caps a heartbreaking saga that gripped the Warmbiers’ small hometown, just a few miles north of Cincinnati. There, in Wyoming, Ohio, Otto Warmbier was a standout soccer player and a 2013 salutatorian at Wyoming High School, his alma mater.
He went on to the University of Virginia, and it was during college, in late 2015, that he traveled to North Korea with a Chinesebased tour group.
He was detained at the airport on Jan. 2, 2016, as the group was preparing to leave the country. He was charged with engaging in anti-state activity for allegedly trying to steal a poster from a hotel, and he was sentenced in March 2016 to 15 years of hard labor.
His family received only one letter from him after his televised trial. After that, they heard nothing until shortly before June 13, when he finally was flown home.
At a press conference on Thursday, Fred Warmbier praised his son’s courage and tried to grapple with the bittersweet homecoming. There is relief, he said, “that Otto is now home in the arms of those who love him. And anger, that he was so brutally treated for so long.”
When he landed at Cincinnati’s Lunken Airport, their son was unable to see or speak, the Warmbiers wrote in their statement on Monday. He wasn’t reacting to verbal commands. “He looked very uncomfortable — almost anguished.”
After just one day, though, his face started to lighten. He looked at peace. “He was home and we believe he could sense that,” the Warmbiers wrote. “We are at peace and at home too.”