diff --git a/codec/h264/h264dec/fuzz/fuzzParseLevelPrefix/fuzz.go b/codec/h264/h264dec/fuzz/fuzzParseLevelPrefix/fuzz.go
index 6dd92378..9ee88dd1 100644
--- a/codec/h264/h264dec/fuzz/fuzzParseLevelPrefix/fuzz.go
+++ b/codec/h264/h264dec/fuzz/fuzzParseLevelPrefix/fuzz.go
@@ -45,6 +45,9 @@ import (
 func Fuzz(data []byte) int {
 	// Create C based BitReader based on data.
 	cbr := C.new_BitReader((*C.char)(unsafe.Pointer(&data[0])), C.int(len(data)))
+	if cbr == nil {
+		panic("new_BitReader returned NULL pointer")
+	}
 
 	// Get the level_prefix from the C code. If got is < 0, then the C code
 	// doesn't like it and we shouldn't have that input in the corpus, so return -1.