A week and a half later, no one seems to know what exactly happened to Kenneka Jenkins. On September 9, the 19-year-old went to a party with friends at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Rosemont, Illinois. She never made it home. She was later found dead inside of a freezer in the hotel. While results of the autopsy are pending, the theory police are currently working with is that Jenkins was drunk and wandered into the freezer, accidentally locked herself in, and died there. Her family isn’t convinced.
“To me, I feel like they helped kill my child: the police department and this hotel,” Teresa Martin, Jenkins’s mother, told local media during a heart-wrenching interview alongside other family members. She said neither the authorities nor the hotel’s staff did enough to address her repeated pleas for help. [...]
Jenkins’s friends, Martin said, told her the young woman disappeared after they briefly left her alone in the hotel hallway to retrieve her car keys and cellphone from inside the room.
But Martin has since questioned that account, telling local media that the friends’ description of events keeps changing.
According to Martin, Kanneka’s friends called her around 4 AM to tell her that they were unable to find her daughter. She proceeded to call the police and tried to file a missing report—citing that Kanneka wasn’t the type of person to just wander off and that she was worried because she didn’t have a high tolerance for alcohol. The dispatcher told her to give it some time and the police did not file a missing person’s report until 1PM. It was then that the family began their own search in the hotel. The police found her body sometime after 12:30 AM the next morning.
Video from social media and surveillance cameras seems to capture her last moments.
In a blue jacket and tailor-ripped jeans, Jenkins walks single-file with three other women through what surveillance footage labels as the hotel’s entry hall — apparently on their way to a party on a floor above.
Police are now studying social-media videos that appear to have been made at that party. One posted to Facebook appears to show Jenkins listening to music in the room. [...]
[Later video shows Jenkins by herself.]
Jenkins staggers through halls with no one else in sight, pausing to rest against a wall at one point, and a few minutes later nearly falling over a railing at the bottom of a staircase.
She looks to be lost — wandering down a hall only to reappear on the camera a minute later; going into a room, then coming back out; and finally returning the way she came. [...]
Walking a little more steadily than she had in the hallways, Jenkins makes her way into an empty kitchen — all stainless steel and reddish tile.
She passes a metal counter and makes her way around an industrial sink.
She sways a bit to the right, then to the left, and then finally walks out of the frame for the last time.
How does a young woman end up wandering unnoticed through a hotel, into the basement, finally stopping in the kitchen which was in a vacant part of the hotel? Why was that area not properly secured from guests? It’s hard to claim that anyone has a universal hotel or travel experience, but even the most seasoned travelers among us have likely never even seen the inside of a hotel kitchen that we weren’t working in. This alone should give the family of Kenneka Jenkins pause. But more importantly, what about her friends? If she was drunk and wandering around the hotel alone, where were they? Amateur sleuths on social media have become engrossed with this case and are speculating all sorts of things about what happened—including urging criminal charges against her friends. Others believe the police and hotel were slow to respond because she was black. There are many questions surrounding this case and answers seem more elusive as the days pass.
Sadly, the answers to these questions won’t bring Kanneka back. But she still deserves justice. What a horrible tragedy for her family to have this young woman go out for the night only for her never to return home. Though the hotel has reportedly offered to pay for the funeral, it’s of little consolation. According to Larry Rogers, a lawyer for the family, "Ms. Martin just wants to know what happened to her daughter," [he] told CNN Saturday. "We're just trying to see where the facts lead."