The Army issued a “WANTED” poster for Spc. Jonathan Kang Lee after he deserted from Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Wash., on Jan. 14, 2024. (Army Criminal Investigative Division)
A soldier at Joint Base Lewis-McChord who deserted to avoid his conviction on child sex charges now faces a court-martial for a murder charge for killing a taxi driver as he attempted to elude authorities, the Army said Monday.
Pvt. Jonathan Kang Lee, 25, is charged with murder for the killing of Nicholas Hokema, 34, a taxi driver for an Olympia, Wash., company, said Michelle McCaskill, a spokeswoman for the Army’s Office of Special Trial Counsel, which handles charges of murder, kidnapping and most sex crimes.
Lee is also charged with desertion, resisting arrest, wrongful use of a controlled substance and failure to obey a lawful order. He would face a mandatory minimum penalty of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole if convicted of murder, according to Army sentencing guidelines. A premeditated murder charge carries a maximum penalty of death, according to military law.
Lee is already serving a 64-year sentence for sex crimes from a prior case. He’s incarcerated at the Northwestern Joint Regional Detention Center, a military medium-security prison on Lewis-McChord, which is about 50 miles from Seattle.
The next step in Lee’s murder charge is to assign a judge and schedule an arraignment date for the soldier, McCaskill said.
On Jan. 14, Lee was scheduled to appear in court at Lewis McChord on six counts of sexual assault against children and other crimes, according to service officials. Instead, Lee fled the base on Jan. 12 in a white 2011 Honda Pilot sport utility vehicle. When he did not report for his daily check-in, the Army Criminal Investigation Division issued a bulletin distributed to Seattle-Tacoma area law enforcement.
Lee was not held in pre-trial detention because he had no prior criminal record, Army officials said. Instead, the soldier was removed from his unit, given unspecified administrative duties, ordered to report daily to an officer to discuss his whereabouts and confined to the Army-Air Force base.
Hokema, a driver for the RediCab taxi company, had not been heard from at the end of a scheduled Jan. 14 overnight shift. The company serves the state capital of Olympia and the nearby Lewis-McChord base. He was found early Jan. 15 in the parking lot of the Westfield Southcenter shopping mall in Tukwila, a southern suburb of Seattle about 22 miles north of the military base. He had been stabbed several times and was pronounced dead at a hospital near Sea-Tac International Airport.
Lee was convicted Jan. 19 in absentia at a court-martial on the sex crimes and sentenced to 64 years in confinement.
Local police and Army investigators located Hokema’s 2012 Toyota Camry taxi on Jan. 26 in Redmond, a city north of Seattle that is 57 miles from Lewis-McChord. Lee was arrested at a nearby apartment complex.
Though apprehended off the base, local prosecutors and military authorities determined Lee should be tried under military law at Lewis-McChord because he was under the Army’s jurisdiction because of his desertion.
Lee is from Great Falls, Va., and has been assigned to Lewis-McChord since 2019, according to the Army. He had been removed from his position in an intelligence-gathering unit in April 2022 when sex assault accusations against him were first raised.
