Declarations filed by two of his dentists describe damage to his teeth that had not existed before his imprisonment by Pyongyang; both say changes were caused by force
Declarations filed in support of a lawsuit filed by the parents of Otto F. Warmbier, the University of Virginia student who died after returning to the U. S. from 17 months in captivity in Pyongyang, may raise new questions about how the college student was treated while in North Korea.
Warmbier, a 22-year-old American, traveled to North Korea in December 2015 and was taken into custody by North Korean officials at the airport Jan. 2,2016. He was accused of stealing a poster from his hotel and sentenced to 15 years of hard labor in March 2016. Warmbier died June 13,2017, shortly after being returned to the United States in a coma.
Otto Warmbier’s parents, Fred and Cindy Warmbier, have filed a lawsuit against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
“It is unbelievable to me that North Korea would send Otto home as a vegetable, with scars on his body and crooked teeth,” Fred Warmbier said in his declaration to a U. S. federal court Oct. 10 in support of a lawsuit he filed with his wife.
The lawsuit was filed in the U. S. District Court for the District of Columbia against North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho. The lawsuit charged the North Korean government with “hostage taking, illegal detention, torture and killing of a young American tourist” in order “to extract various concessions from the United States government.”
Claims of being beaten
In the complaint filed in April, the Warmbiers, who live in Wyoming, Ohio, claimed their son had been intentionally beaten.
“Physically, he returned destroyed in a state of unresponsive wakefulness with a devastating brain injury; he also had a large scar on his left foot and traumatic dental injuries, all of which resulted from North Korea’s torture,” the complaint stated.
North Korea has denied torturing Warmbier .
Declarations from his pediatric dentist and the dentist he transferred to as an adult, suggest otherwise, as does a declaration filed by the neurologist who led Otto Warmbier’s care upon his return from North Korea.
“I remember Otto as having straight teeth without any significant misalignment or crowding,” said Dr. Murray Dock, a pediatric dentist in Cincinnati, Ohio, who was Otto Warmbier’s dentist between 2011 and 2013.
After reviewing post-mortem dental images, Dock stated in his declaration that he “observed substantial differences in the positions of Otto’s… bottom four middle-most teeth.” The teeth were “moved backwards towards the tongue, in comparison to his teeth before he traveled to North Korea. This sort of change would most typically be caused by some sort of impact. Nothing in my treatment of Otto would have led me to expect this sort of change as a result of natural occurrence.
