Army Pvt. Jonathan Kang Lee is led into court at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Wash., on April 23, 2025. (Gary Warner/Stars and Stripes)
JOINT BASE LEWIS-MCCHORD, Wash — A soldier pleaded guilty Wednesday at his court-martial to killing a cab driver during his attempt to desert the Army and avoid conviction on child rape charges.
Pvt. Jonathan Kang Lee, 26, faced a possible maximum penalty of life in prison without parole for killing Nicholas Hokema, 34, of Tumwater, Wash.
Under a plea agreement, Lee admitted his guilt in exchange for a sentence of life with the possibility of parole. He also pleaded guilty to desertion, resisting arrest, and two specifications of failure to obey a lawful order.
Lee was previously convicted of rape and sexual abuse of his stepdaughters.
Lee will be incarcerated at the U.S. Military Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, for no less than 20 years.
“He will be eligible for parole for these offenses no earlier than 2045,” said Michelle McCaskill, spokeswoman for the Army’s Office of Special Trial Counsel at Fort Belvoir, Md. The office prosecutes some of the most serious cases against service members, including charges of murder, kidnapping, and major sex crimes.
Lee was also sentenced to a dishonorable discharge and the forfeiture of all pay and benefits.
After accepting the plea agreement, Col. Tayesha Smith, the military judge, asked Lee whether he had stabbed Hokema to death.
“There was a lot of blood,” Lee said. “I didn’t think he would live.”
Lee’s admission of guilt for the first time publicly provided details of the events in January 2024 when Lee deserted from the Army and avoided capture for 12 days.
Lee, then a specialist with the 201st Expeditionary Military Intelligence Brigade at Lewis-McChord, was facing a Jan. 16 court-martial appearance for the rape and sexual abuse of his stepdaughters, who were at the time 8 and 4 years old.
Under Army policy, he was not in pre-trial detention but restricted to the base and ordered to report daily to an officer.
On Jan. 14, Lee drove away from Lewis-McChord in a white 2011 Honda Pilot SUV.
“I was going to commit suicide or desert,” Lee told the judge.
He said his vehicle broke down and he paid a tow truck to take it away. He then got into a red taxi driven by Hokema.
Lee said he planned to have Hokema drive him to a bus stop because he was running low on money. He said he began feeling ill in the cab and told Hokema to drop him off at the Westfield Southcenter shopping mall in Tukwila, south of Seattle.
Security camera footage of the mall parking lot at about 4 a.m. on Jan. 15 showed Hokema and Lee struggling and Lee stabbing Hokema before dumping the driver’s body in the parking lot and stealing and fleeing in his 2012 Toyota Camry taxi, prosecutors said.
Lee initially said he intended to brandish his knife and get Hokema to “back off” in a dispute over how much fare that Lee owed.
But Lee admitted in court that he stabbed Hokema in the chest, then stabbed him in the neck or head as he slumped over the car’s middle console.
“I killed him,” Lee said. “I did not think he was going to kill or seriously hurt me. He was unarmed and just wanted to get his change back.”
Lee was discovered missing at Lewis-McChord, and the Army Criminal Investigation Division put out a “be on the lookout” bulletin to law enforcement in the region near the base.
In the early hours of Jan. 15, police in Tukwila responded to a report of a body in the parking lot of the mall. They found Hokema fatally stabbed.
On Jan. 19, with Lee still at large, a court-martial panel at Lewis-McChord found him guilty of child rape and sexual abuse charges. He was sentenced to a maximum of 64 years in prison and demoted to private.
Hokema’s taxi was found abandoned in Redmond, north of Seattle, on Jan. 26. Army CID agents went to a nearby apartment that they believed was rented by Lee’s girlfriend.
Lee said when the agents came to the door, his girlfriend warned him and he hid behind a bed in the upstairs bedroom.
Lee jumped from a second-story window, and wrestled with the agents, grabbing for one of the officer’s handgun. Lee was knocked to the ground, handcuffed, and taken away, according to Army CID.
Having been convicted of the child rape and sexual abuse charges, he was confined to the Northwestern Joint Regional Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison at Lewis-McChord.
At the time of his arrest, Tukwila police considered Lee a “person of interest” in Hokema’s death. He named a suspect in March. In September, the Army charged Lee in Hokema’s killing.
Prosecutors and defense lawyers called witnesses as part of the sentencing process to testify about the impact of the case and their relationships with Hokema or Lee.
Nicole Sharkody said she and Hokema had lived happily together with their two cats and a dog. When he failed to come home from his nighttime job as a taxi driver, she left a note on the refrigerator whiteboard telling him to call her as soon as he got home.
Local police told her to come in and file a missing person report. When she arrived at the station with her mother, they were ushered to a room where an officer told them Nick was dead.
The news “shattered, shattered” her life, Sharkody said.
She found out from a friend that Hokema had been shopping for an engagement ring and planned on proposing.
“He was going to ask me to marry him, and I would have said ‘yes’,” she said. “I felt so loved. I miss what could have been.”
Sharkody testified that she had decided to commit suicide out of grief in September, but was hospitalized before she could act.
Jamie Dixon, a forensic psychologist from Atlanta, said she had testified more than 130 times in civilian and military trials.
Dixon said she interviewed Lee. She testified an aggregate of 27 studies show sexual and violent offenders who get group and individual therapy are about 25% less likely to commit the same type of crimes again.
“It starts with taking responsibility,” she said.
Lee told the court of his violent childhood in Virginia, where he said he was beaten by his father, mother, and older brother.
“I joined the Army to get away from home,” he said.
Lee said a deployment to Afghanistan had given him a purpose but “almost every aspect of my life was spiraling” when he came back to the U.S. in 2019.
It was then that he abused his stepdaughters, which led to his first court-martial, his 2024 desertion, and the killing of Nicholas Hokema.
After the sentencing, Lt. Col. Sean Fitzgibbon, the chief prosecutor at the trial, said the life sentence was a just outcome.
“While nothing the court can do will bring Mr. Hokema back, hopefully this sentence will allow for some closure for his friends and family,” he said.
