There are so many unanswered questions surrounding the case of Travis King and his mad dash into North Korea.

For those who have forgotten, this story was complex to begin with. Travis King is a soldier in the United States Army who had been stationed in South Korea, but ended up in jail there for assault. He was supposed to be put on a plane back to Fort Bliss, Texas, and got all the way to the airport, but then the person who was supposed to put him on the plane apparently wasn’t allowed through security because he didn’t have a plane ticket. Somehow, King left the airport and joined a civilian tour group of the DMZ, and while the group was touring the Joint Security Area village on the border, he pulled a “LEEEEROY JENKINS” and ran across the border to North Korea, laughing.

According to NK News, a witness on the same tour saw a male member of her group run across the border as they visited the JSA.

“To our right, we hear a loud HA-HA-HA and one guy from OUR GROUP that has been with us all day- runs in between two of the buildings and over to the other side!!” Mikaela Johansson of Sweden wrote. “It took everybody a second to react and grasp what had actually happened, then we were ordered into and through Freedom House and running back to our military bus.”

She reportedly added that visitors at the JSA had been asked by authorities not to share images of the incident.

The JSA, also known as the “Truce Village,” is the border village inside the DMZ where soldiers from the opposing regimes of Pyongyang and Seoul stand and face one another. It’s also the place where diplomatic negotiations take place between the North and the South.

It has been a little over two months since Travis King ran his sprint to North Korea, and there have been a lot of open questions in the meantime – the biggest one being, did he defect, and what could he give North Korea that would make him valuable to them? Travis King is black, so the likelihood of him blending in and starting over in highly xenophobic North Korea was basically zero.

Well, we might have a partial answer now – or more answers will be forthcoming pretty quickly. Travis King has been returned to United States custody, with the assistance of both China and Sweden. North Korea apparently sent King to China, where the Swedish embassy helped facilitate the transfer of custody.

The Swedish government had also been the point of contact between North Korea and the United States, alerting us that North Korea wanted to send King back just recently. The Pentagon confirmed that King was back in U.S. hands, and thanked China and Sweden for their help.

“U.S. officials have secured the return of Private Travis King from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK),” said Pentagon Spokesperson Brigadier Gen Patrick Ryder.

He added, “We appreciate the hard work of personnel in the Army, United States Forces Korea, and across the Department of Defense to bring Private King home, and we thank the governments of Sweden and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) for their assistance.”

King has been held by North Korean authorities since July 18, when he reportedly sprinted away from a tour group into the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea.

“Ms. Gates will be forever grateful to the United States Army and all its interagency partners for a job well done,” said Jonathan Franks, spokesman for King’s mother, Claudine Gates. “For the foreseeable future, the family asks for privacy and Ms. Gates does not intend to give any interviews.”

What is actually more interesting is what North Korean state media is saying about the release of Travis King. The way they are phrasing it makes it sound like they are kicking him out.

“The relevant organ of the [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] decided to expel Travis King, a soldier of the U.S. Army who illegally intruded into the territory of the DPRK, under the law of the Republic,” state media outlet Korean Central News Agency wrote early Wednesday, according to translations provided by Yonhap News Agency.

North Korea’s state media reported that King confessed to crossing into the North because of “inhuman maltreatment and racial discrimination within the U.S. Army.”

“During the investigation, Travis King confessed that he had decided to come over to the DPRK as he harbored ill feeling against inhuman maltreatment and racial discrimination within the U.S. Army,” KCNA reported. “He also expressed his willingness to seek refuge in the DPRK or a third country, saying that he was disillusioned at the unequal American society.”

While King’s family has insisted that he would not have defected, they also had no other explanation for why he ran across the border. And there are no good answers yet as to why they just decided to let him go.

Officials said they did not know exactly why North Korea decided to expel King, but said they suspected that Pyongyang determined that as a low-ranking serviceman he had no real value in terms of either leverage or information. One official, who was not authorized to comment and requested anonymity, said the North Koreans may have decided that King was more trouble to keep than to simply release him.

North Korea’s decision to release King after 71 days appears relatively quick by the country’s standards, especially considering the tensions between Washington and Pyongyang over the North’s growing nuclear weapons and missile program and the United States’ expanding military exercises with South Korea. Some had speculated that North Korea might treat King as a propaganda asset or bargaining chip.

In the end, the North apparently concluded that King simply wasn’t worth keeping, possibly because of the cost of providing him food and accommodation and assigning him guards and translators when he was never to be a meaningful source of U.S. military intelligence, said Cheong Seong-Chang, an analyst at South Korea’s Sejong Institute.

Travis King’s legal troubles, both military and civilian, are not over by a long shot. But it is rather interesting that North Korea kicked him out after just a couple of months, and all they have to show for it are some statements given to state media, and not even a single propaganda video with King in it.

There is plenty of speculation about Travis King’s mental health. All the eyewitness accounts of his run across the border indicate that he laughing. Did he have a psychotic break? Did he treat the whole thing as a joke? And how quickly did North Korean intelligence go from gleeful over a potential defector, to the resignation that King had nothing valuable to give them, and couldn’t even be filmed for propaganda purposes? How did King behave while he was in North Korea? Did he act like he was entitled to special treatment, because he had “defected” to them? That actually seems like a bad comedy film. Soldier defects to North Korea, has no intelligence to give them, no skills they can take advantage of, may or may not have complained about racist American society to an entirely ethnically homogeneous culture that wouldn’t have accepted him either, and had to be provided for and under constant surveillance. Was this, in the end, the North Korean version of “The Ransom of Red Chief“? We had to bribe Iran with $6 billion to get American hostages. North Korea, apparently, just wanted to get rid of Travis King.

I think the only thing we can conclude is that Travis King has issues. Whether they are severe mental ones that caused a break with reality, or whether he just thought that he would try his luck in North Korea because he was American (and therefore valuable), or whether he really believed that the Army and the United States in general was so mean and racist and he was just going to leave it all behind – clearly, this is a 23 year old with emotional problems. Maybe now, he can get the help he needs without creating another international incident.

Featured image: Travis King, cropped, service photo from United States Armed Forces, public domain