Fred and Cindy Warmbier told Fox News of the moment a plane brought their son back home to Ohio. Medical staff entered the plane first, and then the family boarded the plane.
“So what we pictured, because we’re optimists, is that Otto would be asleep and maybe in a medically induced coma and then when our doctors here would work with him and he’d get the best care and love that he would come out of it,” said Cindy Warmbier.
The family entered the aircraft to see the young man for the first time since his capture by the North Korean regime in 2015. They walked onto the plane and saw Otto on a stretcher, unable to control his body movements, and screaming hysterically, making a sound that they never thought could come from a human being.
“Otto had a shaved head, he had a feeding tube coming out of his nose, he was staring blankly into space, jerking violently,” said Fred Warmbier. “He was blind. He was 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 goes on to describe how his wife and Otto’s sister Greta both ran off the plane while he and Otto’s brother Austin remained.
“Within two days of Otto being home his fever spiked to 104 degrees. He had a large scar on his right foot.” said Fred Warmbier. “North Korea is not a victim. They’re terrorists. They purposely and intentionally injured Otto.”
Otto Warmbier was arrested in North Korea at the age of 21, a student from the University of Virginia on a trip. He was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor for trying to take a propaganda poster from a North Korean hotel.
As the family recounts in the interview, while Otto was in North Korea officials from the Obama administration told the family to keep quiet and wait for the situation to blow over. After President Trump took office Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was able to quickly get the young man home.
U.S. medical professionals saw no signs of botulism. They said his extreme brain damage was likely caused by having the blood supply cut off from his brain.
Friends Read Free