The news organization Reuters reported Thursday that the U.S. Army has levied eight criminal charges against Private 2nd Class Travis King, the soldier who ran across the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) into North Korea in July and was repatriated in September.
King was reportedly scheduled to return to Texas from South Korea on July 18, 2023, after completing a prison sentence in Seoul. American military authorities escorted him to the country’s Incheon Airport and left him there. King, rather than board a flight home, booked a tour of the DMZ and ran into North Korea.
“This man gives out a loud ‘ha ha ha,’ and just runs in between some buildings,” a witness told CBS News at the time. “I thought it was a bad joke at first, but when he didn’t come back, I realized it wasn’t a joke, and then everybody reacted, and things got crazy.”
The communist regime governing North Korea took weeks to confirm that King was in its custody and safe. It ultimately deported King on the grounds that he had entered the country illegally. North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) claimed that King had fled into the country to avoid alleged racial discrimination in America.
Barricades are placed near the Unification Bridge, which leads to the Panmunjom in the Demilitarized Zone in Paju, South Korea, on July 19, 2023. (Ahn Young-joon/AP)
Reuters’ reporting echoes early reports suggesting that legal charges awaited King in Texas had he boarded his flight. According to the news agency, the Army has charged King with a variety of transgressions, some related to his run into North Korea and others tied to alleged “broad misconduct before that incident.” King reportedly faces a charge of desertion for fleeing into the communist country and assault charges for allegedly attacking fellow American soldiers. One of the eight charges, Reuters claimed, was solicitation of child pornography.
“King was accused of soliciting a Snapchat user in July 2023 to ‘knowingly and willingly produce child pornography,'” Reuters reported. “He was also accused of possession of child pornography.”
Publicly available information about King at the time of his disappearance into North Korea did not indicate that he had any history of soliciting child pornography. King did have a criminal record in South Korea, however, reportedly as the result of multiple incidents involving attacks on civilians and police in Seoul.
“Early in the morning on Oct. 8 last year, police arrested King in Seoul after receiving a report about him assaulting another person. He continued being ‘aggressive’ toward the victim and police officers and was detained in a patrol car,” the regional news site NK News reported in July. In a separate incident, King was accused of “punching a South Korean national in the face multiple times after a drunken altercation at a Seoul club at 9:40 a.m.” In one of his alleged run-ins with South Korean law, King reportedly kicked a police car and shouted, “fuck Korean, fuck Korean army, fuck Korean police.”
Reuters noted that the U.S. Army did not confirm its reporting, which was based on legal documents its reporters allegedly obtained. It noted that the King family had hired an attorney — “Franklin Rosenblatt, who served as lead military defense counsel during the court martial proceedings against Bowe Bergdahl” — presumably in anticipation of the military trial process.
“I am grateful for the extraordinary legal team representing my son, and I look forward to my son having his day in court,” King’s mother, Claudine Gates, told Reuters, urging the public to give her son “the presumption of innocence.”
A portrait of Army Private Travis King is displayed as his grandfather, Carl Gates, talks about his grandson on July 19, 2023, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. (AP Photo/Morry Gash, File)
“The man I raised, the man I dropped off at boot camp, the man who spent the holidays with me before deploying did not drink,” Gates told Reuters. “A mother knows her son, and I believe something happened to mine while he was deployed. The Army promised to investigate what happened at Camp Humphreys, and I await the results.”
No details exist publically regarding what happened to King after he ran into North Korea and before Pyongyang decided to expel him. The criminal charges allegedly issued against him present a different picture than what the Korean Central News Agency appeared to claim in its few brief statements regarding the soldier.
“According to an investigation by a relevant organ of the DPRK [North Korea], Travis King admitted that he illegally intruded into the territory of the DPRK,” KCNA claimed in a report on the “findings” regarding King published on August 16, 2023. “During the investigation, Travis King confessed that he had decided to come over to the DPRK as he harbored ill feeling against inhuman maltreatment and racial discrimination within the U.S. Army.”
In this photo taken in Seoul on August 16, 2023, a man walks past a television showing a news broadcast featuring a photo of U.S. soldier Travis King, who ran across the border into North Korea while part of a tour group visiting the Demilitarized Zone on South Korea’s border on July 18. (ANTHONY WALLACE/AFP via Getty Images)
The North Korean government is stridently anti-American and routinely accuses the United States of a variety of international crimes and human rights violations. In 2020, at the height of the Marxist “Black Lives Matter” movement in the United States, North Korean state propaganda vehicles promoted content condemning the American legal system and disparaging America as irreparably racist.
“The tragic murder committed in Atlanta — at a time when anti-racist demonstrations triggered by the brutal killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis are sweeping across the country — is the revelation of reality in the U.S., where racial discrimination is rampant,” the Pyongyang Times, a government vehicle, proclaimed in 2020. “Analysts claim that the clampdown on blacks by the white police under the pretext of law enforcement … are the epitome of deep-rooted social inequality in American society.”
In its first remarks regarding King, KCNA claimed he did not want to return to “the unequal American society.”
The state of North Korea is one of the world’s most prolific and egregious human rights criminals, maintaining prison camps where entire families are condemned to lives of slavery if one member is accused of disagreeing with the brutal regime or of believing in Christianity, among myriad other “crimes.” Torture and executions of people of faith are common, as are mass food shortages, a lack of access to medicine, and other staples of communist governments.