According to a coroner, Otto Warmbier suffered extensive brain damage after blood circulation was cut off. The American citizen who died in June shortly after he returned home was essentially tortured to death by the North Korean regime. All for pulling down a Communist poster in North Korea.
Otto F. Warmbier, the college student imprisoned in North Korea and returned to the United States in a vegetative state, suffered extensive brain damage following interrupted blood flow and a lack of oxygen, according to the coroner who examined his body.
But an external examination and “virtual autopsy” conducted by the coroner’s office in Hamilton County, Ohio, could not determine how his circulation had been cut off.
“All we can do is theorize, and we hate to theorize without science backing us up,” Dr. Lakshmi Sammarco, the county coroner, said in an interview Thursday.
Mr. Warmbier, 22, an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, was convicted in March 2016 of trying to steal a propaganda poster while on a trip to North Korea and sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. He was flown back to the United States in June in a vegetative state.