What to Know About Otto Warmbier, the U.S. Student Freed by North Korea

Warmbier grew up in a leafy suburb that has produced Olympians (the swimmer Deana Deerdurff, the hurdler David Payne), an eminent illustrator (Robert McGinnis, who created the movie posters for Breakfast at Tiffany’s and several James Bond films), a general, a federal judge and a world authority on stroke rehabilitation. Warmbier’s father, Fred, runs a small metal finishing company.

Wyoming High School is one of the country’s best and most competitive public schools—a staggering 90% of students take Advanced Placement courses—and in 2013, Warmbier graduated as its salutatorian. “He was off-the-charts brilliant,” Trey Lonneman, who played club soccer with Warmbier through middle and high school, says. When Warmbier was a senior, it was rumored among his classmates that he had received a perfect or near-perfect score on the ACT, the college entrance exam.

Peers regarded him as intelligent but also a bit eccentric, and deeply earnest, especially when it came to pursuing a career in finance. This is not especially surprising—UVA ranks among the country’s top 10 programs in business and finance, according to U.S. News and World Report, and draws droves of students accordingly—but those who knew Warmbier said his ambitions were betrayed by a certain guilelessness. “[He was] heading into investment banking, but he was definitely not from that whole world,” one student says.

Still, his résumé was impressive. He took on a rigorous course load, including one advanced econometrics course at the London School of Economics, and participated in a prestigious student investment group.

He was one of 20 foreigners on a trip organized by Young Pioneer Tours, a travel company based in China and staffed by a coterie of chummy Brits and Aussies who arrange, in their words, tours to “destinations your mother would rather you stayed away from.” They offer package tours to Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, but really, folks come for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), as the North is formally called. The totalitarian hermit kingdom exists in the imagination of many as inscrutable and thrillingly dangerous.

Warmbier’s junket was billed as the “New Year’s Party Tour”: a five-day itinerary, devised and closely monitored by state-sponsored tour guides. The travelers met soldiers in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), the 2.5-mile-wide buffer zone that has separated North Korea from the prosperity and liberty of South Korea since 1953; they posed for photos beneath the two 72-foot-high statues of North Korea’s founder, Kim Il Sung, and his son and heir Kim Jong Il, at Pyongyang’s Grand Monument. At night, they drank, slamming vodka and North Korean beer until the early hours of the morning in the closely watched hotel.

A Young Pioneer representative will go through the process last, to make sure the group has gone through smoothly. Warmbier was the last of his group to check in, and thus there was only one non-Korean witness to what happened next: 24-year-old Briton Charlotte Guttridge. When she noticed that he was taking longer than usual, she began to walk over to him, only to be told by an insistent airport official that she had to pass through immigration immediately.

Once on the other side of passport control, she looked and saw that was Warmbier was being led away by two uniformed officers. “Otto!” she yelled. He looked at her, and then was led into a room off to the right of the immigration desks. His calmness initially put her at ease—she suspected, then, that the officers were simply inspecting his luggage or electronics, which happens. “He was not dragged away and he wasn’t yelled at,” Guttridge later told Reuters. She stayed in the terminal until the final call for boarding, and then somewhat anxiously took her seat aboard the Air Koryo Tupolev Tu-214, a Soviet-era jet.

Richardson has traveled to North Korea eight times; he has connections with high-ranking North Korean diplomats. He first became involved in Warmbier’s case not long after the arrest, when he got a call from Ohio Governor John Kasich. In September 2016, amid diplomatic tensions over North Korea’s nuclear bomb test that month, his center sent a delegation to the country to meet with North Korean officials.

“The reason this has taken longer is that Kim Jong Un is very unpredictable,” Richardson says of efforts to secure Warmbier’s release. “In the past, under Kim Jong Il these types of political prisoners were used as bargaining chips. One was able to make deals with the [North Korean] leadership—basically for the release of Americans you’d get humanitarian aid or a high-level visit.”