Sgt. Jonathon Fehr appears in two images inset against Camp Lejeune’s welcome sign. (Screengrabs via WRAL; TikTok; U.S. Marines Corps)
A U.S. Marine Corps sergeant at the center of a TikTok homicide mystery says he did tell a story about burying a dead man’s body on video – but insists the key part of that story is the genre, fiction.
In the widely viewed video, Sgt. Jonathon Fehr, visibly and audibly inebriated, tells a tale about “some random ass f—— biker dude” who was buried at the end of a long-ago out-of-service “LZ” – or “landing zone” – at infamous Camp Lejeune.
In a recent interview, however, he blamed his ex-wife for posting the footage without the full story or proper context.
“In the back of my mind, I was like, I know who posted this,” Fehr told Raleigh-based NBC affiliate WRAL.
According to him, the video was recorded roughly four years ago.
“It’s a very old video,” Fehr said. “I had hair. And, you know, I’m bald now.”
In the footage, Fehr tells the woman filming where to find the body buried and how it came to need an impromptu burial.
The story concerns a fight between two other Marines and the alleged victim on an indeterminate date. On the night in question, the Marines “didn’t f—– like” the biker and got into a fight with him behind a pub and grill in Sneads Ferry, North Carolina.
Notably, the video cuts in mid-sentence.
“–trail,” Fehr says in the controversial footage. “There’s a frikkin’ right turn. Then you take a left turn. And there’s, like, an open LZ. At the very end of that LZ, if you walk into the woods, like 20 to 30 feet into those woods, ’cause nobody ever uses that LZ, you dig like 10 feet down. And there’s a f—– dead body.”
The choice of editing, he says, was intentional.
In his recent interview, Fehr said he told the story after “drinking all weekend.” Only one portion of the video didn’t get shared on social media, he said, the part where he says the story is fake.
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And, not only fake, he says, but not even his.
“It started with us, like, telling stories from, like, when we were privates and lance corporals,” Fehr said. “Talking about what our NCO used to say to us to intimidate us. And I was merely just reiterating a story that I was told. And that everybody knew was a joke.”
Joke or not, drunk or sober, the footage has prompted a dual-pronged investigation by the U.S. 2nd Marine Division and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Both agencies confirmed to Law&Crime this week that they were looking into the video but said they could not offer any additional details due to the ongoing nature of their investigations.
Fehr says he was one of the first people to contact the authorities.
“I saw that and told my spouse to immediately report it to NCIS. I haven’t done anything wrong,” Fehr told WRAL on Wednesday. “This will all come back as debunked, which it did.”
Fehr says the TikTok video has negatively impacted his livelihood.
After two days at drill sergeant school, he said, he was “sat down” by the powers-that-be and “dropped” from the course.
Fehr says strangers have harassed his wife.
“It got sent to my spouse’s place of work,” Fehr told the TV station. “With a message saying like, ‘Hey, like, you employ this person. You’re married to this murderer who’s committed this heinous crime – yada yada yada. Like, you should not employ this person anymore.”
He says he is looking to hire a lawyer over the negative knock-on effects of the social media post.
“I joined the Marines Corps and stayed in the Marine Corps because I like leading younger people,” Fehr told WRAL. “I like leading my junior Marines. I like being that person people look up to. With that video out there, all these comments out there, can you really look up to somebody like that when something is being said about them?”
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