22-year-old American honors student Otto Warmbier only intended to spend five days on a sightseeing tour in North Korea in 2016, a classic example of traveling for knowledge gone wrong.
He ended up spending 17 months there in detention instead of the 15 year sentence he got for stealing a propaganda poster from the hotel where he was lodged. His family believes he was tortured into a vegetative state while he was detained in North Korea.
On Monday, the Warmbier family announced he had “completed his journey home”, he died in Cincinnati, Ohio, with his family at his side. “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,” his family said. “But we choose to focus on the time we were given to be with this remarkable person.”
Sen. John McCain said “Let us state the facts plainly: Otto Warmbier, an American citizen, was murdered by the Kim Jong Un regime”. Trump also condemned the “brutal regime” and mourned the loss of a young man “in the prime of life.”
“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 United States once again condemns the brutality of the North Korean regime as we mourn its latest victim.”he said.
Moon Jae-in, President of South Korea sent his condolences and a letter to Warmbier’s family.
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