WYOMING, Ohio — By 7 a.m. Thursday, young people were stepping through the wet grass to gather outside Wyoming High School, where Otto Warmbier gave a joyful graduation speech as salutatorian four years ago.
A crowd of young women in black dresses hugged before joining the growing crowd by the doors, hours before the funeral service for the 22-year-old University of Virginia student. Groups of young men in dark suits walked along the quiet neighborhood streets, where blue and white ribbons are tied to thousands of trees.
People waited patiently to go in: an elderly lady who struggled to walk along the graduation walk, where seniors have bricks etched with their name; crowds of young people; and boys too young to knot their own ties.
Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, was there, along with Deputy National Security Adviser Dina Powell, Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan and Joseph Yun, a State Department official who played an instrumental role in getting Warmbier out of North Korea.
Shortly before 9 a.m., there were still hundreds of people in line, and officials began warning them it was likely not everyone would be able to get in. The high school had capacity, between several rooms, for 2,500 people. In the gym, people pressed close on blue bleachers, watching a screen of the ceremony in the auditorium.
Last week, when Warmbier finally came home, people tied ribbons to the trees that arch over the main street here and to the wooden street signs hanging from wrought-iron scrolls in this close-knit suburb of Cincinnati. Otto Warmbier had been imprisoned in North Korea for nearly a year and a half. People had been praying for his release. But he returned in a coma, medically evacuated, so the close-knit community sought, without words, to convey how much they felt.
He died Monday, surrounded by family.
Internationally, his death reverberated. Several national leaders called it murder. President Donald Trump called it a disgrace. It intensified already-raw tensions between the United States and North Korea.
At home, it brought people together.
The surge of people walking toward the high school, on streets so quiet the birds sounded loud, was one sign of that love.
The ribbons were another. Volunteers fanned out Wednesday well past the center of this city of 8,400 people, far beyond the large Victorian houses, stone churches and graceful old trees, to ensure that the ribbons in Wyoming city schools colors fluttered all along the route from the high school, where the memorial ceremony will be held Thursday morning, to the cemetery where the family will gather later in the day.
In a downpour Wednesday night, a family with small children was tying blue and white ribbons to the iron gate of the cemetery where Warmbier will be buried. Orange ribbons, a nod to the University of Virginia, were already there.
There were other signs as well: Pops of orange, for one, as friends from the University of Virginia arrived, tying ribbons of their own, or wearing a touch of the school color as a tribute and a signal.
“Godspeed, Otto,” one sign read. Another offered prayers.
Some people drove to Wyoming straight from Charlottesville, Va., on Wednesday.
On Tuesday night, people had gathered at the University of Virginia for a candlelight vigil. A swift response to the news of his death Monday, on a campus quiet for the summer break, it drew 600 people.
“I think people are just struggling to make sense of it all,” said Sarah Kenny, the president of the U-Va. student council, who organized the event. “People are really shocked and upset.”
A professor spoke of a prayer for mourners, its emphasis not on death and loss but the abiding presence of God.
“There are mysteries we cannot fathom,” he said, in remarks videotaped and widely shared.
Some of Warmbier’s friends spoke, as candles glowed in the amphitheater around them, about his brilliance, his adventurousness, his boundless joy, his faith in connection. He was the one to call rather than text, often, for routine plans (even if friends initially found that weird). He was the one to ignore a hand proffered for an introductory handshake with a grin and a tight embrace, saying, “Let’s bring it in,” or “Let’s hug it out!”
Warmbier was a junior at U-Va., headed for a career in finance, when he went to North Korea with a tour group on the way to a study-abroad program in Hong Kong.
He was not allowed to leave the country. He was accused of trying to steal a propaganda poster, charged with “hostile acts against the state,” and given a 15-year sentence after a sham trial.
His parents had no word of him since March 2, 2016, until earlier this month, when North Korean officials disclosed that he was in a coma, and had been for more than a year.
After a medical evacuation, an air ambulance touched down in Cincinnati last week, and he was rushed to the hospital. Doctors said he had a severe neurological injury, and was unresponsive.
At U-Va., close friends, captured on video, told the crowd they were thinking of him smiling his goofy smile down on them. Billy Burgess, one of his fraternity brothers, told how Warmbier had cemented a friendship with a local man with cerebral palsy, connecting over a love of literature and sports. “Everyone needs a friend like Otto,” he said.
” . . . We love you, and we miss you like hell.”
Alex Vagonis, who just graduated from U-Va., told the crowd about the bin full of thrift-store ties he had amassed, going to Waffle House with him after semi-formals, and the intense interest he brought to everything, as though he might just burst into thin air.
She told the other students that they would get through the horror of his death; to do otherwise would be an injustice to Warmbier, she said, since he always wanted to see others fly.
Kenny said Wednesday she was surprised that people didn’t seem more angry, more vindictive about his death.
“I am incredulous that after going through something so traumatic, they could be that hopeful, and just – full of love.”
On the program for his memorial service – a celebration of his life, his family said – was a line from that speech, quoting a character on “The Office”: “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.”
People came Thursday morning, lined up by the hundreds, to celebrate Otto Warmbier, and something they wanted to hold onto: the good old days.
