$501M for family of N. Korea vic

The parents of Otto Warmbier, the University of Virginia student who died after being arrested in North Korea, have been awarded $501 million.

U.S. District Court judge Beryl Howell in Washington ruled Monday that the Warmbiers had shown satisfactory evidence to obtain the right to relief but would not receive the full amount asked.

Fred and Cindy Warmbier of Wyoming, Ohio, sought $1.05 billion in punitive damages and $46 million in suffering in an October filing. Instead, they will be awarded exactly $501,134,683.80.

“North Korea is liable for the torture, hostage taking, and extrajudicial killing of Otto Warmbier (photo) and the injuries to his mother and father,” Howell wrote in the decision.

The estate for Otto Warmbier is entitled to $6,038,308 in economic losses, $493,375.80 in medical expenses, $15 million in pain and suffering, and $150 million in punitive damages.

Fred and Cindy are each entitled to compensatory damages of $15 million, and $300 million in punitive damages.

Otto Warmbier was visiting North Korea with a tour group when he was arrested and sentenced to 15 years of hard labor in March 2016 on suspicion of stealing a propaganda poster. He died in June 2017, shortly after he returned to the U.S. in a coma. He spent 18 months in North Korean captivity.

“Before Otto traveled with a tour group on a five-day trip to North Korea, he was a healthy, athletic student of economics and business in his junior year at the University of Virginia, with ‘big dreams' and both the smarts and people skills to make him his high school class salutatorian, homecoming king, and prom king,” Howell wrote in the 46-page memorandum opinion.

There is no mechanism to force North Korea to pay, making the judgment largely a symbolic victory.