Otto Frederick Warmbier (December 12, 1994 – June 19, 2017) was an American college student who was imprisoned in North Korea in 2016 on a charge of subversion. In June 2017, he was released by North Korea in a vegetative state, and died shortly thereafter.
Warmbier entered North Korea as part of a guided tour group on December 29, 2015. On January 2, 2016, he was arrested at Pyongyang International Airport while awaiting departure from North Korea. He was convicted of attempting to steal a propaganda poster from his hotel, for which he was sentenced to 15 years of imprisonment with hard labor.
Shortly after his sentencing in March 2016, Warmbier suffered a severe neurological injury from an unknown cause and fell into a coma, which lasted until his death. North Korean authorities did not disclose his medical condition until June 2017, when they announced he had fallen into a coma as a result of botulism and a sleeping pill. He was freed later that month, still in a comatose state, after 17 months in captivity. He was sent back to the United States and arrived in Cincinnati, Ohio, on June 13, 2017. He was taken to the University of Cincinnati Medical Center for immediate evaluation and treatment.
Warmbier never regained consciousness. Due to the severity of his condition, his parents requested his feeding tube be removed. He died on June 19, 2017, six days after his return to the United States. A coroner's report stated that he had died from an unknown injury causing lack of oxygen to the brain. Non-invasive internal scans found no signs of fractures or trauma to his skull.
In 2018, a U.S. federal court found the North Korean government liable for Warmbier's alleged torture and death, in a default judgment in favor of Warmbier's parents after North Korea did not contest the case.
Otto Frederick Warmbier was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on December 12, 1994. He was the eldest of Cynthia "Cindy" (née Garber) and Frederick Warmbier's three children. Warmbier's mother was Jewish, and he identified as Jewish. He attended Wyoming High School in Wyoming, Ohio, where he was considered popular and studious, and graduated in 2013 as salutatorian. After that, he enrolled at the University of Virginia, where he was pursuing a double major degree in commerce and economics, and did a foreign exchange at the London School of Economics. His minor was in global sustainability. Warmbier was active in Hillel on his college campus. He was a member of the Theta Chi fraternity. Being interested in other cultures, he had visited Israel (on a Birthright trip), Europe, Cuba, and Ecuador.
Warmbier was scheduled to undertake a study-abroad program in Hong Kong in early 2016, and decided to visit North Korea en route over the New Year period. He booked a tour of North Korea with Young Pioneer Tours, a budget tour operator based in China founded by two Westerners, self-described as "destinations your mother would rather you stayed away from". Warmbier's father, Fred, said that Young Pioneer advertised the trip as safe for U.S. citizens and that Otto was "curious about their culture [...] he wanted to meet the people of North Korea."
On December 29, 2015, Warmbier flew via Beijing to North Korea with his tour group, which included ten other U.S. citizens, for a five-day New Year tour. The tour group celebrated New Year's Eve by carousing in Pyongyang's Kim Il Sung Square before returning to the Yanggakdo International Hotel, where some continued consuming alcohol. According to his trial, Warmbier tried to steal a propaganda banner from a staff-only area of the hotel just before 2:00 am on January 1, 2016.
On January 2, 2016, Warmbier was arrested at Pyongyang International Airport while awaiting departure from North Korea. Danny Gratton, a British member of Warmbier's tour group, witnessed the arrest. He said:
No words were spoken. Two guards just came over and simply tapped Otto on the shoulder and led him away. I just said kind of quite nervously, 'Well, that's the last we'll see of you.' There's a great irony in those words. That was it. That was the last physical time I saw Otto, ever. Otto didn't resist. He didn't look scared. He sort of half-smiled.
When the group's plane was about to leave the terminal, an official came aboard and announced, "Otto is very sick and has been taken to the hospital." Some media reports indicated that Warmbier spoke by phone to a Young Pioneer tour guide following his arrest, but this was denied by a Young Pioneer spokesman who told BBC News that "none of its employees had direct contact with Otto after he was escorted away". The others in his tour group left the country without incident.
North Korea's state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) initially announced that Warmbier had been detained for "a hostile act against the state", without specifying details. North Korea refused to elaborate on the nature of his wrongdoing for six weeks, although a Young Pioneer spokeswoman told Reuters there had been an "incident" at the Yanggakdo Hotel. In a press conference on February 29, 2016, Warmbier, reading from a prepared statement, confessed that he had attempted to steal a propaganda poster from a restricted staff-only area of the second floor of the Yanggakdo Hotel to take home. The poster said (in Korean), "Let's arm ourselves strongly with Kim Jong Il's patriotism!". Damaging or stealing such items with the name or image of a North Korean leader is considered a serious crime by the North Korean government.
It is not known whether the confession was forced, as Warmbier never regained consciousness after his return to the U.S. However, at least one observer said that he was "clearly under duress". Former prisoners of North Korea have later recanted their confessions after their release, stating they were made under duress.
Warmbier's confession also stated that he had plotted to steal the poster at the behest of a Methodist church in his hometown and the Z Society, a secret society at the University of Virginia that he wished to join, both of which he said were allied with the Central Intelligence Agency. These claims, which Time called "fanciful" and "implausible", were disputed by both the church and the Z Society. The New York Times remarked that "the unlikely nature of the details suggested the script had been written by Mr. Warmbier's North Korean interrogators". The Israeli-born U.S. negotiator Mickey Bergman said that Warmbier's family were advised to maintain silence about his Jewish heritage while he was under arrest, as negotiators believed that publicly repudiating Warmbier's purported affiliation with a Methodist church would antagonize the North Korean government.
On March 16, 2016, a few hours after U.S. envoy Bill Richardson met in New York with two North Korean diplomats from the United Nations office to press for Warmbier's release, Warmbier was tried and convicted in North Korea's Supreme Court. He was charged with subversion under Article 60 of North Korea's Criminal Code. The court held that he had committed a crime "pursuant to the U.S. government's hostile policy toward [North Korea], in a bid to impair the unity of its people after entering it as a tourist". Evidence at his trial, which lasted one hour, included his confession, CCTV footage, fingerprint evidence, and witness testimony. The CCTV footage showed a man, identified as Warmbier by his North Korean guide, entering the staff-only area. On March 18, KCNA released a brief low-resolution video, time-stamped 1:57 a.m., showing a figure removing a banner from a wall and placing it on the floor.
Warmbier stated in his confession that he abandoned the banner after discovering it as it was too large to carry away. A hotel staff member told the court: "When I got off work, there was nothing amiss. But when I returned, I thought someone had deliberately taken the slogan down, so I mobilized security to prevent damage to it and reported it to the authorities." Warmbier's confession reads as follows: