Otto Warmbier’s Parents Describe Son’s Return Home: He Was ‘Jerking Violently, Making These Inhuman Sounds’

It’s been more than three months since the death of Otto Warmbier, the American student who was held in North Korea for 15 months and returned to the United States in a coma, only to die shortly thereafter.

On Tuesday, Fred and Cindy Warmbier gave their first interview since their son’s death, calling North Korean officials “terrorists” who “intentionally injured” their son.

One particularly horrifying moment was recounted by Fred Warmbier:

We walked over to the plane, the engines are still humming, they had just landed. We walked up the steps. When we got half way up the steps, we heard this howling, involuntary, inhuman sound. We weren’t really certain what it was. We climbed to the top of the steps, and we looked in, and Otto was on the stretcher, across — in the plane, and he was jerking violently, making these inhuman sounds.

Cindy and Greta ran off the plane; Austin and I walked over to Otto. Otto had a shaved head, he had a feeding tube coming out of his nose, he was staring blankly into space, jerking violently; 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.

The rest of the heartbreaking interview can be seen here: