Nearly one year before President Donald Trump‘s historic handshake with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un on Tuesday, the president painted a very different picture of the “brutality” of the Kim regime following the release of an American student who was in a coma.
Otto Warmbier, a 22-year-old who attended the University of Virginia, was evacuated to a medical center in Cincinnati in an unresponsive state on July 13, 2017, after close to a year and a half in captivity.
Warmbier, who was on a five-day tour of North Korea, was arrested and accused of stealing a propaganda poster. He was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor.
A family statement issued on the eve of his release said that they had just learned of the coma one week before, and expressed joy at the prospect of being reunited.
“We want the world to know how we and our son have been brutalized and terrorized by the pariah regime in North Korea,” the statement read. “We are so grateful that he will finally be with people who love him.”
Six days later, Warmbier would be dead.
North Korea claimed he slipped into a coma after contracting botulism and taking…
