Otto Warmbier was tortured while imprisoned in North Korea and his condition was worse than imagined, his parents told "Fox & Friends" Tuesday.
Warmbier, a 22-year-old college student, was accused of a "hostile act" while in North Korea in 2016 for taking down a political poster in a Pyongyang hotel and was sentenced to 15 years hard labor, according to CNN.
North Korea released Warmbier on June 13 in a state of "unresponsive wakefulness," said University of Cincinnati physicians who examined him when he returned to the United States, the broadcaster noted.
Officials from North Korea said Warmbier contracted botulism and went to a vegetative state after taking a sleeping pill, but an American physician said he suffered "extensive loss of brain tissue in all regions of the brain."
He was pronounced dead in Cincinnati on June 19, Fox News said. Even though the family declined an autopsy after his death, per CNN, Fred and Cindy Warmbier charged that their son was tortured.
They said he returned home blind and deaf, with mangled teeth, jerking violently and moaning on a stretcher with a feeding tube coming out of his nose, per Fox News.
"So what we pictured, because we're optimists, is that Otto would be asleep and maybe in a medically induced coma and then when our doctors here would work with him and he'd get the best care and love that he would come out of it," Cindy Warmbier told "Fox & Friends."
"Otto had a shaved head, he had a feeding tube coming out of his nose, he was staring blankly into space, jerking violently," Fred Warmbier added. "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.
"North Korea is not a victim, they are terrorists. They purposefully and intentionally injured Otto."
President Donald Trump weighed in on the interview through Twitter.
U.S. Sen. John McCain charged that North Korea murdered Warmbier and new South Korea president Moon Jae-in added that the regime was responsible for the death, CBS reported in June.
"This had happened while Warmbier was in the detention of North Korean authorities," Moon told CBS News. "We cannot know for sure that North Korea killed Mr. Warmbier. But I believe it is quite clear that they have a heavy responsibility in the process that led to Mr. Warmbier's death."
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