WYOMING, Ohio (AP) — U.S. Sen. Rob Portman says North Korea must be held accountable for what happened to an American college student who was detained there for over a year and died after being returned home to Ohio in a coma.
Ohio’s Republican senator calls Otto Warmbier “an amazing young man” who shouldn’t have been detained. Portman spoke Thursday outside Wyoming High School in Warmbier’s hometown, where hundreds of people lined up early for a public memorial service. It was closed to the news media.
A coroner is trying to determine Warmbier’s cause of death. Relatives say they were told the 22-year-old University of Virginia student had been in a coma since shortly after he was sentenced to prison in March 2016.
He’d been accused of trying to steal a propaganda banner.
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