The parents of a University of Virginia student who was detained in North Korea for nearly a year and a half, then died just days after he returned home in a coma, lashed out at Pyongyang in their first television interview since their son's death and called on North Korea to be listed as a state sponsor of terror.
Fred and Cindy Warmbier appeared Tuesday on Fox & Friends, saying they'd had time to do some healing in the three months since they buried their 22-year-old son, Otto.
"But now we see North Korea claiming to be a victim and that the world is picking on them, and we're here to tell you: North Korea is not a victim," Fred Warmbier said. "They're terrorists. They kidnapped Otto. They tortured him. They intentionally injured him. They are not victims."
Warmbier was arrested in January 2016 at the end of a brief tourist visit to the isolated country. This past June, he was medically evacuated and was being treated at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center when he died.
"Unfortunately, the awful torturous mistreatment our son received at the hands of the North Koreans ensured that no other outcome was possible beyond the sad one we experienced today," the Warmbiers said in a written statement after his death.
Fred and Cindy Warmbier watch as the casket for their son Otto is placed in a hearse after his funeral in Wyoming, Ohio on June 22. Photo / AP
North Korea denied that Warmbier had been tortured and tried to cast his death as a "mystery."
North Korea claimed Warmbier slipped into a coma after contracting botulism and taking a sleeping pill and that he was provided proper medical care.
On Tuesday, the Warmbiers vehemently pushed back against these claims, sharing the utter shock and grief they felt meeting their comatose son at the airport.
"We walked over to the plane; the engines are still humming," Fred Warmbier said. "When we got halfway up the steps, we heard this howling, involuntary, inhuman sound. We weren't really certain what it was. ... Otto was on the stretcher across in the plane, and he was jerking violently, making these inhuman sounds."
Fred Warmbier said his wife and daughter ran off the plane, while he and his other son walked over to the stretcher. Otto Warmbier now had a shaved head, a feeding tube emerging from his nose, and was blind and deaf.
"As we looked at him and tried to comfort him, it looked like someone had taken a pair of pliers and rearranged his bottom teeth," Fred Warmbier said.
"They destroyed him," Cindy Warmbier added, shaking her head. Within two days, their son's fever spiked to 40 degrees; there was a large scar on his right foot, they added.
"Our image of Otto, as you know, was of someone just wonderful, beautiful inside and out. And to see how he came home was too much for us," Cindy Warmbier said, her voice breaking. "I almost passed out, but I got it together, and I rode in the ambulance with him, because I did not want him to be alone anymore.
"He'd been alone for way too long. And we stayed with him and loved him as best as we could."
In late 2015, Warmbier travelled with a tour group to North Korea on his way to a study-abroad programme in Hong Kong but was not allowed to leave the country. After a sham trial in 2016, he was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor for what North Korea called "hostile acts against the state".
Shortly after that, apparently, Warmbier was injured. He was denied consular visits, and his family had no word of him after March 2016, until they were told this June that he had been in a coma for more than a year. He was medically evacuated and arrived back in Cincinnati for treatment June 13.
Doctors said Warmbier had suffered extensive loss of brain tissue, consistent with cardiopulmonary arrest, and was in a state of unresponsive wakefulness. They were unsure what had caused the brain damage: He did not show any obvious indications of trauma, nor evidence of either acute or healing fractures. However, they also were not aware of anything from his previous medical history, before his time in North Korea, that might have caused cardiopulmonary arrest.
"We weren't prepared for what we had, and then when we saw Otto the way he was, we loved him, we're proud of him - but no mother, no parent should ever have gone through what we went through," Cindy Warmbier said Tuesday on Fox News. "And the fact that Otto was alone, all that time, with no one to comfort him, is inexcusable. Whatever happened - I mean, why would you do this?"
She added that she felt he had only been sent home because he was about to die.
Fred Warmbier reiterated that North Korea should be listed as a state sponsor of terror.
"It was astounding to Cindy and I to discover that North Korea is not listed," he said. " ... We owe it to the world to list North Korea as a state sponsor of terror."
The State Department "strongly warns" US citizens not to travel to North Korea, "due to the serious and mounting risk of arrest and long-term detention of US citizens."
A State Department official told The Post on Tuesday that the agency "consistently" reviews intelligence on North Korea.
North Korea used to be on the department's list of state sponsors of terrorism, placed there in 1988 for selling weapons to terror groups and its involvement in the 1987 bombing of a Korean Air flight over the Andaman Sea. But North Korea's designation was removed in 2008 by President George W. Bush for meeting all the requirements for nuclear inspections. There have since been growing calls for the Trump administration to re-list it.
Shortly after the "Fox & Friends" interview aired, President Trump made it clear he had been watching by tweeting his approval of the segment.
Great interview on @foxandfriends with the parents of Otto Warmbier: 1994 - 2017. Otto was tortured beyond belief by North Korea.
