Around the same time as Otto’s death, U.S. hostilities with North Korea were growing heated. This was the period of “fire and fury,” and of Trump and Kim comparing who had the “bigger & more powerful” nuclear buttons. Behind the scenes in Washington, dovish diplomats, like Joseph Yun, were replaced by hawks, like John Bolton, one of the architects of the Iraq war. The likelihood of conflict grew so real that an American diplomat warned a Seoul-dwelling friend in confidence to move his assets out of South Korea.

On TV and social media, and in official speeches, Republican officials cited Otto’s death as a reason Kim Jong-un needed to be confronted. When making a case for a forceful response against North Korea to the South Korean National Assembly, in November 2017, Trump said their common enemy had “tortured Otto Warmbier, ultimately leading to that fine young man’s death.” In his January 2018 State of the Union address, Trump pledged to keep “maximum pressure” on North Korea and to “honor Otto’s memory with total American resolve,” while the Warmbiers wept in the gallery. Meanwhile, Fred and Cindy traveled the country reinforcing the narrative that Otto was tortured. As Cindy told the United Nations in New York City, “I can’t let Otto die in vain.” In April 2018, the Warmbiers, seeking damages, filed a lawsuit alleging that North Korea “brutally tortured and murdered” their son.

Despite how Trump and his administration boosted the narrative that Otto was physically tortured, however, the evidence was not clear-cut. The day after the Warmbiers went on national television to declare that Otto had been “systematically tortured and intentionally injured,” a coroner who had examined Otto, Dr. Lakshmi Kode Sammarco, unexpectedly called a press conference. She explained that she hadn’t previously done so out of respect for the Warmbiers. But her findings, and those of the doctors who had attended Otto, contradicted the Warmbiers’ assertions.

Fred had described Otto’s teeth as having been “re-arranged” with pliers, but Sammarco reiterated that the postmortem exam found that “the teeth [were] natural and in good repair.” She discovered no significant scars, dismissing the one on his foot as not definitively indicative of anything. Other signs of physical trauma were also lacking. Both sides of Otto’s brain had suffered simultaneously, meaning it had been starved of oxygen. (Blows to the head would have likely resulted in asymmetrical, rather than universal, damage.) Though the Warmbiers declined a surgical autopsy, non-invasive scans found no hairline bone fractures or other evidence of prior trauma. “His body was in excellent condition,” Sammarco said. “I’m sure he had to have round-the-clock care to be able to maintain the skin in the condition it was in.” When asked about the Warmbiers’ claims, Sammarco answered, “They’re grieving parents. I can’t really make comments on what they said or their perceptions. But here in this office, we depend on science for our conclusions.” Three other individuals who had close contact with Otto on his return also did not notice any physical signs consistent with torture.

The origin of Otto’s injury remained a mystery. “We’re never going to know,” Sammarco said, “unless the people who were there at the time it happened would come forward and say, ‘This is what happened.’ ”

Discovering the truth of events that happen in North Korea is a task that even American intelligence agencies struggle with. But Otto’s experience after his arrest is not a black hole, as it has often been portrayed. Through intelligence sources, government officials, and senior-level North Korean defectors, and drawing on the experiences of the 15 other Americans who since 1996 have been imprisoned in North Korea—some in the same places as Otto—it is possible to describe Otto’s probable day-to-day life there.

Within the electrified fences of many of North Korea’s notorious prison camps dwell up to 120,000 souls, condemned for infractions as minor as watching banned South Korean soap operas. The human-rights abuses within have been extensively documented, creating a compelling case that they are among the worst places in the world. The lucky survive on starvation rations while enduring routine beatings and dangerous enforced labor, like coal mining. The unlucky are tortured to death. In Seoul, one North Korean, who had endured three years at a low-level camp for trying to flee the country, wept as she told me: “North Korean prisons are actually hell. We had less rights than a dog. They often beat us, and we were so hungry we would catch mice in our cells to eat.” She saw six to eight fellow prisoners die every day.

But American detainees escape that fate. When Otto finally opened his eyes again, he likely found himself at a guesthouse, which is where the State Department believed he was probably kept. At least five previous American detainees have been imprisoned in a two-story building with a green-tiled roof in a gated alleyway behind a restaurant in downtown Pyongyang, which is run by the State Security Department, the North Korean secret police. (Others have been kept at a different guesthouse, and at least three have stayed at a hotel.) The most used guesthouse is luxurious by local standards—detainees can hear guards using its karaoke machine into the wee hours—but Otto would have likely found its two-room suites roughly equivalent to those in a basic hotel. And no matter how nice his suite, it was also a cell, for he would have been allowed out only for an occasional escorted walk.

For the next two months, until his forced confession, Otto would probably have been relentlessly interrogated; American missionary Kenneth Bae said he was questioned up to 15 hours a day. The goal wasn’t to extract the truth but to construct the fabulation that Otto read off handwritten notes at his news conference. In the past, North Korea has spun false confessions from small truths, and in this case they may have construed a conspiracy from a souvenir propaganda poster that Otto had bought, according to Danny Gratton, Otto’s tour roommate. No previous American detainee has accused North Korea of using physical force to extract a confession, but if Otto protested his innocence, he probably received a warning similar to the one given to Ohioan Jeffrey Fowle, who was detained two years before him: “If you don’t start cooperating, things are going to become less pleasant.” As the journalist Laura Ling wrote of her five months in detention, “I told [the prosecutor] what he wanted to hear—and kept telling him until he was satisfied.”

Ever since the sailors of the U.S.S. Pueblo were beaten in 1968, there have been no clear-cut cases of North Korea physically torturing American prisoners. When Ling and fellow journalist Euna Lee sneaked over the North Korean border, Ling was struck as soldiers detained them. But once their nationalities were established, they were sent to the green-roofed guesthouse. American media, including The New York Times, have widely repeated the claims that missionary Robert Park was physically tortured, but Park himself has reportedly said that the story that he was stripped naked by female guards and clubbed in the genitals was fabricated by a journalist. On the contrary, the North Koreans have carefully tended to the health of Americans they have captured, caring for them, if needed, in the Friendship Hospital where Otto was kept; 85-year-old detainee Merrill Newman was reportedly visited by a doctor and nurse four times a day. As a high-level North Korean defector who now works for a South Korean intelligence agency said, “North Korea treats its foreign prisoners especially well. They know someday they will have to send them back.”

But that doesn’t mean that North Korea doesn’t psychologically torture detained Americans—in fact, it has always tried to bludgeon them into mental submission. Bae, Ling, and other prisoners were repeatedly told that their government had “forgotten” them and were given so little hope that they only learned of their impending freedom an hour before being released. When I met former detainee Bae in the Seoul office of his NGO dedicated to helping North Korean defectors, he told me, “Being imprisoned was lonely, isolating, and frustrating. I was on trial for all of America, so I had to accept that I had no control and there was no way I could get out of the impending punishment.” While some previous detainees were allowed letters from home, it seems that North Korea denied Otto any contact with the outside world. His only break from the interrogations was likely watching North Korean propaganda films. The psychic trauma of all this has sent previous detainees into crushing depressions, and even driven some to attempt suicide.

In the footage of his news-conference confession, Otto looked physically healthy, but as he sobbed for his freedom, he was obviously in extreme mental distress. Two weeks later, in mid-March, as Otto was filmed after being sentenced to 15 years of hard labor, his body still looked whole, but his expression was vacant and he had to be supported by two guards as he was dragged out of the courthouse—as if the life had drained out of him.

Until now, the next assumption about Otto’s fate was that he had suffered severe brain damage by “April,” as the first brain scan sent back with his body was time-stamped. Speculation suggested that the tragedy might have occurred at a special labor camp for foreigners, where at least three Americans have performed their hard-labor sentences. There they were forced to plant soybeans or make bricks while living in spartan conditions, though, as Bae wrote, “Compared to the average North Korean serving time in a labor camp, I was in a four-star resort.” Certainly, it would have been more likely for any type of tragedy—over-exertion under a furnace sun, a work accident, or even directed beatings—to occur in that barbed-wire-enclosed valley a few miles outside Pyongyang. But Otto almost certainly never made it to the labor camp.

“The staff at Friendship Hospital said they received Otto the morning after the trial and that when he came in he was unresponsive,” Dr. Flueckiger told me. “They had to resuscitate him, then give him oxygen and put him on a ventilator, or he would die.” As Yun, the negotiator who helped free Otto, said, “The doctors were clear that he had been brought to the hospital within a day of his trial, and that he had been in that same room until I saw him.”

The previously unreported detail of when Otto was admitted to the Friendship Hospital changes the narrative of what could have happened to him. If Otto was “repeatedly beaten,” as the intel reports suggested, it would logically have been during the two to six weeks between his sentencing, when videos of him showed no signs of physical damage, and “April,” as the North Korean brain scan was dated. But Otto was apparently unconscious by the next morning. The coroner found no evidence of bludgeoning on Otto’s body. And when one takes into account that the entire sourced public case that Otto was beaten derives from that single anonymous official who spoke to The New York Times, the theory begins to crack.

It is for this paucity of evidence that, though the public discourse about Otto’s death has long been dominated by talk of beatings, there have been doubts among North Korea experts that the intelligence reports were correct. Of the dozen experts I spoke to, only a single one thought there was even a remote likelihood that he had been beaten. “I don’t believe Otto was physically tortured,” Andrei Lankov said in his office in Seoul. “The campaign to make Otto a symbol of North Korea’s cruelty was psychological preparation to justify military operations.”

Many experts pointed out that though North Korea is often portrayed as irrational, the Kim family had to be “both brutal and smart,” as Lankov said, to maintain its relative power on the world stage, especially for such a small, impoverished country. What incentive would they have to lose a valuable bargaining chip, especially when they had never been so thoughtless before? To these experts, it made much more sense that Otto was treated like all other detained Americans and that an unexpected catastrophe occurred. But despite the experts’ doubts, none of them could disprove the intelligence reports indicating that Otto had been beaten.

However, a senior-level American official who reviewed the reports told me, “In general, the intel reports were wrong, as the medical examinations have shown. They were apparently not even correct about where Otto was or when he was beaten, for God’s sake. Likely, the reports were just hearsay. Someone heard third- or fourth-hand that Otto was sick, and that person decided he was beaten. The North Koreans have never tortured a white guy physically. Never.” The official said he did not know of the Trump administration having other sources of information about Otto being beaten.

Another senior government official told me, “I can tell you that I’ve been in a lot of classified meetings about Otto, before and after his return. Beforehand, I heard some reporting that he was beaten, but it wasn’t from State or Intel, who never corroborated that, before or after the fact. But it’s possible that there was intel I did not see.”

A congressional staffer familiar with the intelligence reports said, “Before we had Otto back in the United States, we just didn’t know what was going on there. In the end, there was no definitive evidence whether or not he was beaten.” The staffer claimed that the government never got further intelligence reports indicating Otto was beaten.

Three days after the Times published its claims, The Washington Post also cited an anonymous senior American official rejecting reports that Otto had been beaten in custody. South Korean intelligence, generally considered the spy agency with the best sources in North Korea, found no confirmation that Otto was beaten.

But if Otto was almost certainly not “repeatedly beaten,” then what put him in a state of non-responsive wakefulness? And why would the Trump administration allow these unverified rumors to flourish?

Without knowing about the revised time line of Otto’s injury, experts I spoke to overwhelmingly identified some kind of accident—for example, an allergic reaction—as the most likely cause for Otto’s unconsciousness. The likelihood that his brain damage happened immediately after the sentencing, however, raises the possibility that he may have attempted suicide.

Imagine what Otto must have been feeling after hearing that he would spend the next 15 years laboring in what he probably imagined to be a gulag. After two months of being constantly reminded that the American government couldn’t help him, he probably felt that his family, his beautiful girlfriend (who called him her “soul mate”), and his Wall Street future were all lost. What else could he look forward to but physical and mental suffering?

At least two Americans imprisoned in North Korea have attempted suicide. After failing to cut his wrists, Aijalon Gomes chewed open a thermometer and drank its mercury, later explaining that he had given up on America’s ability to free him. Despite eventually having his release won by Jimmy Carter, Gomes was unable to escape his post-traumatic stress disorder, and seven years later burned himself to death. An American official said that Evan Hunziker tried to kill himself while being held, and less than a month after returning home, he shattered his own skull with a bullet in a run-down hotel. Robert Park reportedly tried to take his own life on returning.

Even if North Korea didn’t beat Otto, that doesn’t mean that he wasn’t tortured, as the mental suffering the regime inflicted on him constitutes torture under the U.N. definition. As Tomás Ojea Quintana, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights for North Korea, said, “Otto’s rights were violated on every level.”

The first that Governor Richardson, the back-channel negotiator, heard of Otto’s injury was upon the young man’s release, and he was furious at having been deceived by Pyongyang. But a North Korean ambassador soon contacted Richardson to explain that he had not meant to lead him astray in negotiations and that he too had been kept in the dark. “I believed him,” Richardson told me. “In the 15 years I’ve been negotiating with him, he’s always been honest.” Senator Portman and sources working inside North Korea at the time also stressed that the foreign ministry didn’t know. The minister who was responsible for Otto was demoted and eventually disappeared, according to Michael Madden, a North Korea analyst who tracks its leadership. Even the guards on whose watch Otto was injured were likely sent to prison. All of which means that the full truth of what transpired is likely hoarded only by Kim Jong-un and his most trusted lieutenants, and that it may never get out.

For all the unknowns, one certainty is that the Trump administration allowed the narrative that Otto was repeatedly beaten to spread, long after it was clear those intelligence reports were almost certainly wrong. That the reports suggested that he was beaten repeatedly when there was not time for that showed they were unreliable. The lack of physical evidence of beatings was widely publicized. The administration was informed of the correct time line, and it was well known among government officials who worked on the case. And both the senior-level American officials and the congressional staffer confirmed that the government never shared with them definitive evidence that Otto was beaten.

Now, that’s not to fault the Trump administration for applying maximum pressure on North Korea for an American citizen ending up brain-damaged in its custody: Such behavior warrants punishment. Nor is it to imply that the senior government official lied to The New York Times about the intelligence reports, as some analysts suggested to me; that person seems to have correctly described them. But if the maverick boldness that the administration displayed in rescuing Otto represents the best of Trumpism, what followed once it was clear the reports were flawed encapsulates its troubling disregard for facts when a dubious narrative supports its interests.

It’s impossible to say whether or not Trump had seen or parsed the nuances of the intelligence reports before he tweeted about Fred Warmbier’s Fox interview, supporting that Otto had been physically tortured. Or when he declared, before the South Korean National Assembly, that Otto had been “tortured.” Perhaps those were just two more of the 3,001 false or misleading claims he advanced in his first 466 days in office, according to The Washington Post‘s Fact Checker database. Or maybe it was a conscious strategy. Whatever it was, the misrepresentation helped push the U.S. closer to war with North Korea than it had ever been. Though soon, of course, the administration would choose a different path.

When Fred hugged Otto that first night in the air ambulance, he felt that he couldn’t get through to him and that his son was “very uncomfortable—almost anguished.” But “within a day, the countenance of his face changed,” the Warmbiers said. Though there was no way that Otto could communicate with them, they wrote, “he was home, and we believe he could sense that.” Otto, they said, was finally “at peace.”

We tell stories so that we can make sense of irresolvable unknowns and then act. While no one can prove what happened to Otto in those final few hours, as Trump encouraged the narrative that Otto was beaten and the White House allowed speculation about possible beatings to spread, the administration gave people license to indulge their worst fears about Otto’s fate and act accordingly.

In doing so, the Trump administration may have fostered misperceptions in the Warmbier family itself. During the year after highlighting the story that Otto was physically tortured, Trump praised Fred and Cindy as “good friends” and invited them to high-profile events. But Fred indicated on national television in September 2017 that he had no more knowledge of his son’s case than that put out by the news media. In the lawsuit the Warmbiers filed in April against North Korea for Otto’s death, they continued to assert evidence that he was repeatedly beaten. If they entertain the belief that their son’s last conscious moments were spent in fear and physical agony as he was assaulted, that may be the result of the administration’s unwillingness to acknowledge a different version of events, one that the facts support. But whatever they believe, what is clear is that they are loving parents, dealing with an unimaginably tragic loss, who have been striving to honor Otto’s legacy.

When presented with the findings of this article, the Trump administration declined to comment.

Upon learning that this article did not support claims that Otto was beaten, and included the theory that he may have attempted suicide—a possibility that the family, through their lawyer, dismissed categorically—the Warmbiers withdrew a statement that they had previously provided. Ultimately, they declined to comment for this story.

In the absence of proof, we all have to choose what we want to believe about Otto’s tragedy. And in this political age, where truth seems enslaved to the agendas of the powerful, it is important to consider what story we believe and why. After all, the stories we tell ourselves and others shape our own fates, and those of nations, the world, and other people’s children.

In the end, however, despite all the mystery still surrounding Otto, it is essential to remember two facts that endure as unyielding as gravestones: Otto’s death and the grief of those he left behind.

Fred Warmbier came face-to-face with those responsible for Otto’s death at the Winter Olympics in South Korea. Since the beginning of 2018, North Korea, hamstrung by sanctions and spooked by full-on preparations for war in Otto’s name, had been trying to reset relations with the outside world. The centerpiece of this diplomacy was a “charm offensive” at the February Games—deploying squads of cherubic cheerleaders singing folk songs about re-unification, and Kim Jong-un’s smiley sister shaking hands with world leaders. The North Koreans even reportedly reached out to ask if Vice President Pence wanted to meet her, while warning him not to highlight Otto’s story. Instead, Pence invited Fred Warmbier to sit with him in the VIP box at the opening ceremony, not ten feet from Kim’s sister. Fred barely even looked at her as he sat in grieving dignity, his sorrow rebuking her serene ambassadorial smirk.