Otto Warmbier, the University of Virginia student who died after being sent home from a North Korean prison in June, appeared to have had a breathing tube inserted at some point during his imprisonment, a post-mortem examination shows.
The autopsy report dated Sept. 11 was released after Warmbier’s parents appeared on Fox News earlier this week and said the North Koreans had tortured their son, who was 22.
The post-mortem exam, not a full autopsy, was performed by Dr. Gretel Stephens, deputy coroner for Hamilton County, Ohio. Cindy and Fred Warmbier had refused to have an autopsy performed on their son’s body.
The examination notes scars on Warmbier’s knees, ankle, feet and arms. “There is a round scar just above the sternal notch with mild retraction, consistent with a tracheostomy scar,” it reads.
Related: What Killed Otto Warmbier?
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There’s no way to tell when or why a tracheostomy would have been performed. Tracheostomies are done to help patients recover from having been on a ventilator or to help patients breathe after neurological damage.
The fact that it had scarred showed Warmbier recovered his ability to breathe on his own at some point.
The University of Cincinatti doctors who cared for Warmbier in the few days before his death said he had clearly suffered neurological damage, apparently after an ischemic incident, meaning blood was blocked to his brain.
Related: Warmbier Has Extensive Brain Damage
His parents described a young man not fully conscious but in discomfort.
“Otto was on the stretcher … and was jerking violently making these inhuman sounds,” Fred Warmbier told Fox and Friends.
“He was blind. He was deaf,” Fred Warmbier added. “It looked like someone had taken a pair of pliers and rearranged his bottom teeth.”
The post-mortem report does not address this. “The teeth are natural and in good repair” and the young man’s nose and ears showed “no remarkable alteration,” the report said. There was some scarring around the mouth, the report noted.
The report also described Warmbier as having been “well-nourished”.
Physicians planned a news conference later Wednesday. The North Korean government has said little about what happened to Warmbier after he was arrested and imprisoned for taking a poster from a hotel he was staying in while on a tourist visit to Pyongyang.