Well, without any evidence it is quite an assumption to make that his parents would commit an illegal act such as this after such a short period of time at home.
Withdrawing life support is not generally considered euthanasia - I suspect that when his family realized his condition was hopeless they opted to take his body home and let it die, rather than actively killing their son.
If an autopsy is unlikely to provide new information there is little point in doing one.
this
After over a year in a North Korean prison hospital, he finally gets to the land of The Greatest Medical System in the World, goes through all the diagnoses available, the doctors refuse to discuss his prognosis because the family won’t let them do it publicly, the family takes him home, and then almost immediately he’s dead.
Maybe you simply have faith in coincidences.
AIUI either is illegal, so it cannot be admitted even if they were otherwise willing to.
I believe this too. He was not intubated as far as I know.
In terms of this discussion, it doesn’t really matter, does it? He was essentially dead upon delivery due to the handling of the DPRK. Am I calling for war? No. The younger version of me would have, but I am older and more aware of the disastrous consequences of wars, and I experienced one of them as well. I do not know what kind of response we could give them since we don’t even talk to them directly.
I found Warmbier’s sudden death very puzzling.
As pointed out, a brutal & fairly backwards country keeps him alive for over a year.
He wasn’t even on life support. Check out this video. There’s no machines keeping him alive.
He comes to America with it’s high tech hospitals and dies a week later.
Coma patients often live for decades. There’s been several in the news.
They can if they’re set up in long-term care facilities, not their parents’ homes.
Jesus…
That video you posted does briefly show a security camera footage of (someone) appearing to peel something off a wall…first I’ve seen of that…but still…nobody deserves that fate.
I’m still working on “taking a vacation in a country run by a brutal totalitarian regime that declares your country is its enemy and continually tries to gain leverage against your country by extreme means” …is not a stupid idea. Going there was and still is a stupid decision.
The fact that somebody colored it up as a “tour group” doesn’t make it any less stupid.
We can pour our hearts out for the victim. It’s obvious to anyone but the insane that he DID NOT DESERVE HIS FATE.
We can rage at the NK for it’s brutality, weep for Otto and his family and still acknowledge that he made a stupid decision.
when the doctors described his condition it reminded me very much of terry schaivo.
I believe that his parents (like ms schaivo’s husband) discontinued feeding support and otto passed after that decision. I’m fairly sure they did what they could to keep him comfortable and peacefull.
One is active, the other passive. Passively allowing someone to die is lawful, actively aiding them to die is (generally) unlawful in the US.
This.
Yes, and treating the horrors that the people of North Korea have to live in for all of their lives (remember, they are no less subject to being tossed into decades of hard slave labor, often to die in the process than international visitors) as some sort of tourist destination like visiting Disneyland is crass to say the very least.
Prince Friso of the Netherlands suffered a massive hypoxic brain injury after being buried in an avalanche and resuscitated after 50 minutes of cardiopulmonary arrest. He immediately received some of the best care in the world and still died of complications 18 months later. It happens. The news always has the stories about people who live years in comas but you don’t hear so much about the ones who go into kidney failure or die of aspiration pneumonia or a hospital-acquired infection or a blood clot. Humans aren’t designed to live with most of their brains missing whilst totally immobile. A lot can go wrong, and suddenly.
I was joking.
It just so happens that the comments above mine made my joke true.
That’s hardly my fault though! 
Since when is it illegal to remove someone from life support?
Bullshit. Withdrawing life support is legal. My family had to deal with that several times with the elder members dying off over the years.
Very simple: continued survival depends on hydration. For someone in a coma, that’s either IV or some sort of stomach tube. Warmbier comes home, situation determined to be hopeless, fluids are discontinued (which is legal for circumstances like terminal illness or hopeless situations like persistent vegetative state), and death will generally occur within about a week.
The North Koreans are perfectly capable of providing IV or stomach tube level of healthcare tech.
This doesn’t seem particularly mysterious to me.
This board needs a +1 button.
I didn’t. It’s possible to keep a coma patient alive for decades, but what if they deteriorate? Could transporting him just make things worse? North Korea’s leadership may have concluded that announcing his death would cause a bigger problem than delivering him “alive” and letting him pass away in American hands.