Marines investigating video in which man claims body buried at Camp Lejeune
The Marine Corps and NCIS are looking into the matter.
Marine Corps officials have launched an investigation after a video was shared on TikTok in which a man claims to have helped bury the body of a man killed by two other men near a landing zone at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, officials told Task & Purpose.
“U.S. Marine Corps Training and Education Command is aware of the content published on social media,” Marine Corps spokesman Maj. Joshua Pena said in a statement on Sunday. “There will be an investigation into the matter in cooperation with appropriate commands and organizations.”
No additional information about the Marine Corps’ response to the TikTok video was available on Sunday, Pena said.
The Naval Criminal Investigative Service, or NCIS, has already started an investigation into the video, said NCIS spokesman Jeff Houston.
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“Out of respect for the investigative process, NCIS will not comment further while the investigation remains ongoing,” Houston said on Sunday.
The video was posted four days ago. Although the TikTok user who posted the video wrote in the caption that all three men mentioned in the video are Marines, Task & Purpose has not been able to independently verify their identities.
It is unclear whether the man speaking in the video or the other two people he mentions are in the Marine Corps. The man also does not say when the events he described took place.
In the video, the man appears to explain to a woman who is not seen in the video where a body is buried.
“There’s a friggin right turn and you take a left turn and there’s like an open LZ (landing zone),” the man says. “At the very end of that LZ if you walk into the woods, like 20, 30 feet into those woods [garbled] ’cause nobody ever uses that LZ, you dig like 10 feet down, and there’s a f***in dead body.”
When the woman expresses skepticism about the man’s story, he explains that the two others supposedly killed a “biker dude” after getting into a fight with him outside a pub in Snead’s Ferry, North Carolina, near Camp Lejeune.
“They ended up f***ing killing him,” the man says.
The three men then put the body in the back of a truck, says the man, who claims he was the “DD” (designated driver) as they looked for a place to bury the body.
The video ends just as the man explains that a Provost Marshal Office nearly discovered the three men when they reached a jetty where they initially planned to dump the body.
“We were getting ready to dump in the f***in jetty and a frickin PMO car rolls down to the f***in jetty, like where you dropped me off, and see that when you get thrown in and whatever, the PMO rolled down there,” the man says. “So we stopped doing what we were doing.”
Task & Purpose has been unable to contact the TikTok user who posted the video.
A member of the Onslow County Sheriff’s Office in North Carolina said on Sunday that the office had no information on the matter and referred questions to the Marine Corps.
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