Newly Released Bodycam Video Shows Marine Pilot Walking Away From His $67 Million Jet's Wreckage Near Rimrock Lake

Two months after a Marine Corps fighter jet slammed into a mountainside above Rimrock Lake, the Yakima County Sheriff's Office released body camera footage Friday showing the moment deputies reached the pilot who had just ejected from it. In the video, the pilot approaches a deputy holding up his phone, the screen still lit with a 911 call. "That's an F-18," he says. "Well, that was an F-18." Blood streaks his face. He tells the deputy he was "doing circles over the lake, doing some low-level training" when the aircraft went down: "And then I tucked in, and I'm not sure exactly." A witness who reached him first put it more bluntly: "You hit the tree bad, bud." The June 13 crash destroyed a roughly $67 million F/A-18D Hornet, started a wildfire that closed a stretch of forest road and pushed campers out of the area, and left the Marine Corps' investigation into what went wrong still open. The footage is the first extended public look at what the pilot experienced in the minutes after ejection, and it surfaces as the Pentagon runs a task force built around exactly this kind of non-combat aviation accident.

What the Yakima County Bodycam Actually Shows

The footage, obtained and reported first by ABC News, opens with a deputy from the Yakima County Sheriff's mountain-pass patrol approaching the pilot on foot near the crash site. The pilot, still shaken, holds up a phone showing an active 911 call and confirms what he was flying before the deputy can finish asking: "What kind of jet is that?" A separate witness who reached him is heard telling him he "hit the tree bad." The pilot describes losing control mid-maneuver rather than any mechanical failure he could point to, saying only that he "tucked in" and was "not sure exactly" what happened next. He was left with minor facial lacerations, consistent with what the Yakima Herald-Republic reported the day of the crash, when a sheriff's deputy assigned to the mountain passes found and recovered him before paramedics arrived.

The Sheriff's Office had not previously released video from the response, and Friday's footage is the closest the public has come to hearing the pilot's own account of the seconds before impact. The Marine Corps has not identified him publicly, and this article does not name him.

The two-month gap between the crash and the footage's release is ordinary for a law enforcement bodycam request rather than a sign of unusual delay. Under Washington's Public Records Act, specifically RCW 42.56.240, agencies can withhold investigative recordings when disclosure would harm an active investigation or a person's privacy, and a public-records request for bodycam footage has to identify the specific incident, officer or time and location before an agency will process it. Nothing in Friday's release suggests it was tied to any development in the Marine Corps' separate mishap investigation, which remains open; it reads as a routine records disclosure, not an announcement about the crash's cause.

The June Crash That Sparked the Pine Tree Fire

The jet was a two-seat F/A-18D Legacy Hornet, tail number WS-415, callsign SNAKE 21, flown by a pilot assigned to Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 323, the "Death Rattlers," part of Marine Aircraft Group 11 and the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing out of Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in California, according to The Aviationist. Two aircraft were practicing flight patterns along a training corridor near Rimrock Lake, about 55 miles southeast of Seattle and roughly 52 miles from Yakima, when the pilot ejected around noon on Saturday, June 13. The jet came down in forested terrain on the western edge of the Yakima Valley and ignited what the National Interagency Fire Center logged as the Pine Tree Fire, which grew to about two acres.

The Naches Fire Department and a U.S. Forest Service engine and helicopter responded to keep the blaze from spreading through the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, and the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing would not confirm at the time whether the crash itself caused the fire, per Marine Corps Times. The 1200 Road system on Rimrock's south side was closed, campers in the area were evacuated, and crews spent the following day protecting cabins near Bear Creek before moving into mop-up operations, the Yakima Herald-Republic reported. No injuries were reported beyond the pilot's own.

Two Months Later, the Marine Corps Still Doesn't Know Why

The 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing has said only that "the cause of the mishap is currently under investigation" and that mishap investigations "can take several months to complete, depending on various factors." Two months on, no findings have been made public, and neither Friday's bodycam release nor the sheriff's office statement accompanying it addressed the cause.

The crash automatically qualifies as the Pentagon's most serious non-combat aviation category regardless of the pilot's survival. Under Department of Defense mishap-classification rules, a Class A mishap is any incident in which an aircraft is destroyed, a service member is killed or permanently disabled, or damage exceeds a set dollar threshold that has been raised over the years and now runs into the millions — and the total loss of a Hornet valued near $67 million clears that bar on the destroyed-aircraft criterion alone. That classification triggers a formal safety investigation board separate from any disciplinary review, and its findings are not typically released while the inquiry is open.

What is publicly known has come almost entirely from local agencies and outside reporting, not the Marine Corps: the sheriff's office on the rescue and, now, the bodycam video; the Forest Service on the fire; aviation trade press on the unit and tail number. The Marine Corps' own public statements have stayed limited to confirming the mishap occurred and that it remains under review.

A Pentagon Task Force Already Watching Crashes Like This One

The Rimrock Lake crash is one entry in a wider pattern the Defense Department has been tracking for over a year. Scripps News has counted more than 50 severe non-combat aviation mishaps — the Class A category described above — across the Marine Corps, Navy, Army and Air Force combined in fiscal year 2026, a rate serious enough that the Pentagon stood up an Aviation Mishap Task Force this year specifically to identify recurring risk factors.

Anthony Tata, the undersecretary of war for personnel and readiness, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in May that the task force is meant to "deliver actionable policy recommendations" once it finishes its review. Rep. Gabe Evans, a Colorado Republican and former Black Hawk pilot, framed the underlying problem in systemic terms rather than pilot error, telling Scripps that a crash like this one happens only when "all of the holes" in a service's layered safety checks "have to line up to allow that error trajectory to pass through all of the safety measures."

Diana Moldafsky, a director at the Government Accountability Office, pointed to a more mundane but harder-to-fix driver behind that pattern: aircraft availability. "Not enough aircraft," she said, "puts an increased burden on the air crews, which directly affects safety" — fewer flyable jets meaning the ones that do fly get used more, by crews training under tighter timelines. None of that explains what happened over Rimrock Lake specifically, since the investigation into this crash is still open. But it is the backdrop the Pentagon itself has placed this crash against, and it is why a single Hornet going down in the Cascades has drawn congressional and GAO attention well beyond Yakima County.

How Rimrock Lake's Cabins Survived the Fire the Jet Started

Rimrock Lake is a working recreation area in mid-August, and the Pine Tree Fire broke out at the start of peak camping season on National Forest land that draws boaters, anglers and hikers up from Yakima and the I-90 corridor. The response that kept a two-acre fire from becoming something larger ran on the same volunteer and multi-agency structure that handles most Cascades wildland fires: a Forest Service engine and helicopter for the fire line, Naches Fire Department crews for structure protection, and a sheriff's deputy already on mountain-pass patrol who happened to be close enough to reach the pilot before anyone else did.

That last detail is easy to miss in a story built around a fighter jet, but it is the reason the pilot was found quickly in rugged, forested terrain with no clear crash-site coordinates: routine patrol coverage, not a search-and-rescue callout, got a deputy to him. The same layered response, Forest Service engine plus local fire department plus law enforcement already in the field, protected cabins near Bear Creek through the mop-up phase the following day. For a rural county with a small full-time fire department, a military aircraft crash is the kind of incident that could easily overwhelm local resources; here it didn't, largely because Yakima County's mountain-pass patrol structure and the Forest Service's standing wildfire response were already positioned to handle exactly this kind of terrain.

What a Bodycam Video Can and Can't Tell Investigators

Friday's footage answers the human question the June reporting couldn't: it shows the pilot conscious, mobile and coherent minutes after a high-speed ejection, describing what he remembers without confirming a cause. That distinction matters for the investigation still underway. A pilot's in-the-moment account, recorded on a stranger's bodycam rather than in a formal debrief, is not evidence of mechanical failure, pilot error or anything else the Marine Corps' safety board will ultimately determine; it is a snapshot of shock and adrenaline, not analysis. The pilot himself frames it that way in the video, telling the deputy he isn't sure what happened.

What the release does confirm is that Yakima County's public records, not the Marine Corps, remain the primary channel through which the public is learning new details about this crash two months later. Unless the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing publishes findings once its board completes its review, local agencies' incident reports and footage like Friday's are likely to remain the most concrete record available of what happened over Rimrock Lake on June 13.

The crash also has a bearing beyond Yakima County. It occurred along Visual Route 1355, a low-level training corridor through the Cascades used regularly by Growler squadrons based at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island in Puget Sound, according to aviation outlet MiGFlug, which also reported that VMFA-323 had deployed a handful of its Hornets to Boeing Field in Seattle around the time. Nothing points to the route itself as a factor, and VR-1355 is a decades-old fixture of Washington military aviation. But the investigation's outcome will be read closely by squadrons flying the same terrain out of Whidbey Island, not just VMFA-323 at Miramar.