JBLM soldier who deserted to avoid rape conviction faces murder and court martial for killing taxi driver

A Joint Base Lewis-McChord soldier who deserted to avoid conviction for child molestation now faces murder charges for killing a taxi driver while trying to elude authorities, the Army said Monday.

Pvt. Jonathan Kang Lee, 25, is charged with murder in the death of Nicholas Hokema, 34. Hokema was a taxi driver for a company in Olympia, Washington, said Michelle McCaskill, a spokeswoman for the Army's Office of Special Trial Counsel, which handles murder, kidnapping and most sex crimes.

Lee is also charged with desertion, resisting arrest, drug abuse and failure to obey a lawful order. If convicted of murder, he faces a minimum sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole under Army sentencing guidelines. If convicted of premeditated murder, he faces a maximum sentence of death under military law.

Lee is already serving a 64-year sentence for sex crimes from a previous case. He is incarcerated at the Northwestern Joint Regional Detention Center, a medium-security military prison in Lewis-McChord, about 50 miles from Seattle.

The next step in the murder charge against Lee is to appoint a judge and set a date for the soldier's arraignment, McCaskill said.

On Jan. 14, Lee was scheduled to appear in court in Lewis McChord, where he was charged with six counts of sexual battery of children and other crimes, Army officials said. Instead, Lee fled the base on Jan. 12 in a white 2011 Honda Pilot SUV. When he failed to report for his daily check-in, the Army Criminal Investigation Division distributed a bulletin to police departments in the greater Seattle-Tacoma area.

Lee was not taken into custody because he had no criminal record, Army officials said. Instead, the soldier was removed from his unit, assigned to unspecified administrative duties, required to report daily to an officer to discuss his whereabouts and detained at the Army Air Force base.

Hokema, a driver for the taxi company RediCab, was not heard from at the end of a night shift scheduled for Jan. 14. The company serves the state capital of Olympia and the nearby Lewis-McChord base. He was found early on the morning of Jan. 15 in the parking lot of the Westfield Southcenter shopping center in Tukwila, a southern suburb of Seattle about 22 miles north of the military base. He had been stabbed multiple times and was pronounced dead at a hospital near Sea-Tac International Airport.

Lee was found guilty of the sex crimes in absentia by a court martial on January 19 and sentenced to 64 years in prison.

Local police and Army investigators discovered Hokema's 2012 Toyota Camry taxi on Jan. 26 in Redmond, a city north of Seattle, 57 miles from Lewis-McChord. Lee was arrested at a nearby apartment complex.

Although he was arrested off base, local prosecutors and military authorities decided that Lee should be tried under military law at Lewis-McChord because his desertion placed him under Army jurisdiction.

Lee is from Great Falls, Virginia, and has been assigned to Lewis-McChord since 2019, according to the Army. He was relieved of his position in an intelligence unit in April 2022 when allegations of sexual assault were first made against him.