Almost a day after going missing, 19-year-old Chicago teen Kenneka Jenkins was found dead in a walk-in freezer at the Crowne Plaza Chicago O'Hare Hotel & Conference Center in Rosemont.
According to The Chicago Tribune, Jenkins told her mother on Friday that she was going bowling and to a show, but really she went to a party on the hotel's ninth floor. When it was time to leave, Jenkins' friends said they noticed Jenkins' phone and car keys had been left in a room, but they couldn't find Jenkins. After an extended search, they alerted Jenkins' family, who hadn't heard from her since 1:30 a.m. on Saturday.
An initial inquiry into Jenkins' whereabouts at the hotel turned up nothing. Eventually, the family began knocking on doors on the ninth floor of the hotel to see if anyone knew where she was.
At one point, surveillance footage was retrieved that showed Jenkins stumbling around in what is said to have been a drunken state near the front desk. After searching an area that was under construction, Jenkins' body was found in a walk-in freezer that, while turned on, was not in use.
While an autopsy is being done on Jenkins' body, it doesn't appear that foul play is being suspected in her death. Jenkins' mother, Teresa Martin, has her doubts. She says that Jenkins' friends' "stories changed over and over," leading her to believe Jenkins didn't end up in the walk-in freezer on her own. "Those were double steel doors, she didn't just pop them open," she told the Tribune.
Martin also isn't feeling how the hotel passed her off to Rosemont police instead of reviewing surveillance footage from the beginning, on top of Rosemont police being slow to get to the bottom of what was going on in the first place.
