This week, a federal judge ordered North Korea to pay the parents of Otto Warmbier of Wyoming and their son's estate more than $501 million for fatally mistreating him and causing the death of the University of Virginia student.

Fred and Cindy Warmbier filed the legal action in April seeking damages. The North Korean government never responded. On Dec. 19, Beryl A. Howell, chief judge for the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., heard evidence from the Warmbier family and North Korea experts. On Christmas Eve, Howell issued a 46-page opinion granting the Warmbiers a default judgment and the damages.

Otto Warmbier was ending a visit to North Korea in January 2016 when authorities arrested him at the airport in the capital city of Pyongyang. Three weeks later, Warmbier delivered a stilted “confession” to stealing a poster from a hotel. In March 2016, Warmbier was convicted in a show trial of crimes against the state and sentenced to 15 years at hard labor.

U.S. officials had counseled his family to keep silent over as Warmbier’s parents waited for an end to his ordeal. For 15 months, the family heard nothing. In June 2017, the North Korean government released Otto Warmbier, but he returned to Cincinnati with a massive brain injury that had left him blind, deaf and unable to move under his own power. He died June 19, 2017, at 22.

Howell’s opinion revealed intriguing new details about the case. Here are five of them.

Warmbier’s fate knotted to geopolitics

Howell’s opinion illustrated how significant a pawn Warmbier was to North Korea as it escalated its bellicose talk against the United States.

The judge pointed out that four days after Warmbier’s detention at the Pyongyang airport, North Korea claimed to have tested its first hydrogen bomb. A few days later, after Congress passed new sanctions on North Korea, that government released Warmbier’s “confession." The trial and sentencing occurred one day after President Barack Obama signed an executive order imposing sanctions on North Korea.

Howell wrote that North Korea took its actions with Warmbier “to gain leverage as North Korea engaged in highly publicized nuclear and long-range missile tests and the United States developed its North Korea sanctions policy.”

The judge’s ruling noted the naked quid pro quo at work: “The State Department cautioned the Warmbiers against speaking to media outlets or publicly about Otto’s detention because North Korea was “going to want something for Otto,” and the more the family spoke publicly, “the more it was going to cost.”

Tour-company president left him there

Warmbier was visiting North Korea through a company called Young Pioneer Tours, which promised a safe trip. He was supposed to leave North Korea Jan. 2, 2016, and his parents expected a call when his plane landed in China. Instead, they heard nothing until the next day, when a company official reported that Warmbier missed his flight because North Korean officials had taken him out of the airport security line.

“The tour company reassured Otto’s parents that ‘everything was fine,' adding that the president of the tour company stayed with Otto, and he would be 'on the next flight out.’" In succeeding days, Young Pioneers told Warmbier’s parents that his inability to leave North Korea “was just a misunderstanding.”

“Shortly thereafter, however, the tour company said that Otto was sick and had been taken to a hospital, and the president of the tour company left North Korea for China, leaving Otto unaccompanied in North Korea.”

A spokesman for Young Pioneers wasn't immediately available for comment.

What the offending poster said

In the March 2016 show trial, the North Koreans convicted Warmbier of stealing a poster from an employee section of a hotel. Quoting an expert, Howell said the poster read, “Let’s arm ourselves strongly with Kim Jong-il patriotism!” a reference to the second supreme leader of North Korea and father of the current leader, Kim Jong Un.

David Hawk, a North Korea expert who testified for the Warmbiers, said North Korea “almost certainly tortured Otto” since stealing a poster of revolutionary zeal would mean “particularly brutal treatment” in North Korea, even execution.

Was he tortured?

It may never be known definitively. Doctors at the University of Cincinnati examined Warmbier upon his return and found no broken bones that would suggest an extreme physical ordeal. Howell’s ruling, however, embraced the conclusion of U.S. officials and outside experts that North Korean officials tortured Warmbier to elicit a confession then “to deter the United States from responding either with military actions or sanctions in the face of North Korea’s increased nuclear and conventional weapons testing.”

North Korea has claimed all along that Warmbier ended up in brain death because of botulism poisoning. Howell noted in her ruling that UC doctors ran tests to scan for botulism that might still have been in Warmbier’s body – and they found none.

The strange 'confession'

Howell took note of the “preposterous” confession riddled with peculiar references and cultural malapropisms. The confession, for example, wrongly refers to Fred Warmbier’s company, Finishing Technology, as “Finishing Cincinnati Black Oxide.” The confession also claims Otto Warmbier “practiced” by stealing signs around his college campus and storing them under his bed. His father found no signs. The confession says in stealing the poster, Otto Warmbier was trying to raise $200,000 to fund his younger siblings’ education. Such fundraising would be expected of an older son in a Korean family.

Otto Warmbier's family awarded $500 million in suit against North Korea | Torture | Default Judgment