Honors student, Otto Warmbier who was detained in North Korea for 17 months returned to the U.S in a coma and died six days later.
On Thursday, Warmbier’s Ohio hometown will bid farewell to the student whose foreign tour turned into a national nightmare. The funeral will be at Wyoming High School, his alma mater where tributes will be paid to the late Warmbier, according to reports.
Fred and Cindy Warmbier, Otto’s parents in a statement said;
“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. 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”.
The family had rejected the option of an autopsy leaving his official cause of death a mystery. The Hamilton County Coroner’s Office in Ohio examined the 22-year-old’s body after his death Monday and honored his family’s wish not to have an autopsy. It only conducted an external examination.
The coroner’s office statement said, “No conclusions about the cause and manner of Mr. Warmbier’s death have been drawn at this time as there additional medical records and imaging to review and people to interview “.
