In late December of 2015, a twenty one year old college student from Ohio boarded a plane heading into one of the most closed off, dangerous countries on the entire planet. He thought he was signing up for an adventure. What he actually walked into would end up costing him his life, and it would take the entire world watching to understand just how badly it went.
His name was Otto Warmbier. He was a University of Virginia undergraduate, studying economics and international relations, and by every account he was a bright kid with a promising future ahead of him. He decided to take a short trip to North Korea, and he booked it through a company called Young Pioneer Tours, an outfit that specialized in taking curious Western tourists into the country on tightly controlled group tours. He joined the tour in late December 2015, and for a few days everything went the way these trips normally go. Guides watching every move, scripted stops at government approved sites, and tourists getting a heavily filtered glimpse of a country that almost nobody gets to see up close.
Real Image of Otto Warmbier
Then came January 2. The tour was over, and Otto's group was standing in line at Pyongyang's airport waiting to board a flight back to China. And that's when North Korean officials walked up to him and pulled him out of the line.
One of the people traveling with him remembered making a joking comment to Otto just before it happened, saying something like well, we won't be seeing you again, and Otto laughed it off. That was the last time anyone in his tour group ever saw him.
For weeks, nobody knew what was going on. It wasn't until three weeks later that North Korea publicly announced they were holding Otto, accusing him of committing what they called a hostile act against the state.
And here's what that hostile act supposedly was. North Korean authorities released a grainy black and white surveillance clip, time stamped from New Year's Day, showing a shadowy figure in a hallway of his hotel reaching up and pulling a large propaganda poster down off the wall. They claimed that figure was Otto, and that he had crept into a restricted staff area of the Yanggakdo Hotel to steal it.
Surveillance Images released by North Korean Authorities.
In February, North Korean state media paraded Otto in front of a room full of reporters in Pyongyang. Visibly shaken, he read out what was almost certainly a scripted, coerced statement. He said a member of a church back in Ohio had promised him a used car worth ten thousand dollars if he brought back a North Korean propaganda banner as a trophy. Then in March, he was hauled in front of North Korea's Supreme Court for what amounted to a one hour show trial. He had no real legal representation, He was denied consular visits from the Swedish embassy, the country that represents American interests in North Korea, which was a direct violation of standing diplomatic agreements. At the end of that hour, the court came back with a verdict. Guilty of subversion. The sentence was fifteen years of hard labor.
Otto Warmbier appear on North Korean court room.
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| Otto Warmbier in the custody of North Korean Forces. |
The world reacted immediately. The White House publicly demanded his release, accusing North Korea of using American citizens as pawns to further its own political agenda. But North Korea didn't budge, and Otto disappeared into their prison system.
And here's the part that makes this whole case so unsettling. From the moment of that trial in March 2016, no outside person, no diplomat, no journalist, nobody, laid eyes on Otto Warmbier again for over a year. He simply vanished into North Korea's custody, and the outside world had absolutely no idea what was happening to him.
Then, in June of 2017, out of nowhere, North Korea reached out and said they were releasing him.
But when American officials went to retrieve him, what they found was nothing like the healthy twenty one year old who had walked into that airport a year and a half earlier. Otto was in a coma. He could not speak, could not open his eyes, and could not respond to anything around him. Doctors described his condition as a state of unresponsive wakefulness, and confirmed he had suffered a severe traumatic brain injury.
Otto Warmbier arriving to a US airport.
North Korea offered an explanation, and it was one that convinced almost nobody. Their story was that Otto had taken a sleeping pill sometime after his trial, developed botulism from it, and slipped into a coma as a result, and that this had all happened before he ever set foot in their labor camp system. When American doctors examined him after he got home, they did not find obvious signs of a physical beating, but they did determine that his brain damage was consistent with a prolonged loss of blood flow and oxygen to the brain, which is not something a sleeping pill and botulism typically explain away. To this day, North Korea has never given a full, credible account of what actually happened to Otto Warmbier during those seventeen months, and the truth of what was done to him in that prison system may never be known.
He was flown home to Cincinnati, and for a week his family stayed by his hospital bed, hoping for some kind of miracle. It never came. On June 19, 2017, Otto Warmbier died, six days after arriving back in the United States, having never regained consciousness and never gotten the chance to tell anyone what happened to him in that country.
The aftermath was swift and it was loud. Otto's death became one of the most talked about diplomatic flashpoints of that entire year. His parents, Fred and Cindy Warmbier, filed a lawsuit against the North Korean government, accusing the regime of taking their son hostage and then torturing and murdering him. In 2018, a US federal judge agreed with them. The court found North Korea liable for Otto's death and ordered the regime to pay more than five hundred million dollars in damages, with the judge stating plainly that North Korea had seized Otto to use as a pawn in its ongoing standoff with the United States.
Parents of Otto Warmbier
North Korea, of course, never paid a cent of that judgment, and never will.
Otto's case ended up reshaping how the US government handles Americans traveling to North Korea altogether. Not long after his death, the State Department banned US passport holders from traveling there for tourism, a restriction that is still in place today. His name became shorthand in Washington for exactly what can happen when an American citizen becomes a bargaining chip inside a country that answers to no outside authority. And for his family, all that was left was a twenty two year old son who left for what he thought was a short, unusual vacation, and came home in a box six days after he arrived, never able to tell them what really happened to him behind those walls.
Picture taken of Otto Warmbier & others who traveled along with some local kids.