Otto Warmbier's Roommate During North Korea Tour Reveals Details About Their Trip to Pyongyang
The roommate of the young American who is now in a coma after being released from a North Korean detention facility spoke for the first time of his experience with the victim. Danny Gratton was the only witness to Otto Warmbier's arrest at Pyongyang airport, but the U.S. government never contacted him.
North Korea released Warmbier early last week after detaining him for 18 months. The college student was accused of stealing a propaganda banner from the Pyongyang hotel he was staying in and was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor during a one-hour trial in March 2016.
Warmbier had been in a coma for more than a year, but this was only revealed by North Korea last week. Upon arriving in his home state of Ohio on Tuesday, the 22-year-old was taken straight to University of Cincinnati Medical Center where doctors said he suffered severe tissue loss in his brain.
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Gratton, a sales manager in his mid-40s, told Washington Post that he met Warmbier in Beijing in December 2015 on their first day of a tour to North Korea. The University of Virginia student went to Pyongyang on a five-day guided tour on his way to a study-abroad trip to Hong Kong.
Being single males, the two were made to share a room in the hotel where they struck a friendship. Gratton had a chance to know Warmbier really well and described him as a mature lad for his age. "At no stage did I ever think he was anything but a very, very polite kid," he said.
The offense purportedly happened on the second night in Pyongyang, which was New Year's Eve. The group went out drinking at the city square and back in the hotel where Warmbier allegedly went into a staff-only area of the hotel and tore down a propaganda banner hanging on the wall.
"I've got nothing from my experiences with him that would suggest he would do something like that," Gratton said. "No one deserves that. He was just a young lad who wanted a bit of adventure. Every once in a while they single out someone to make a point, and this was just Otto's turn. It's so sick and warped and unnecessary and evil," he added.
