Early Sunday morning brought a heartbreaking end to the search for 19-year-old Kenneka Jenkins, who had been unaccounted for for nearly 24 hours.
Jenkins went out Friday night, celebrating a new job she got at a nursing home. She left her house in Near West Side at 11:30 p.m. to attend a party at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Rosemont, Illinois, WGN reports.
Around 4:30 a.m., her mother, Teresa Martin, received a call from her friends that they were unable to find Jenkins after the party. Martin, who did not know about the hotel party until her daughter's friends called, according to the Chicago Tribune, went to the hotel and asked the hotel staff if she could look at the surveillance footage. Hotel staff directed Martin to the police. The police told her to wait a few hours, suggesting that Jenkins could still be out with friends.
"These are all precious hours, especially when I went, between 4 and 5-ish," Martin said, according to NBC Chicago. "Within that time, maybe we could have saved my child's life."
Martin and her older daughter, Leonore Harris, took matters into their own hands soon after. They began searching the hotel themselves, knocking on hotel doors hoping to find Jenkins.
"We were begging for help, and no one was helping," Martin told WGN of the hotel staff.
After a missing persons report was filed Saturday afternoon, the hotel “actively canvassed and searched the immediate area,” according to the police.
Her body was ultimately found inside a walk-in freezer at 12:24 a.m. Sunday.
Jenkins' friends told Martin the group was leaving the party when they realized Jenkins had left her keys and phone at the party, according to the Chicago Tribune. Jenkins stayed in a hotel hallway while the friends went to retrieve the items, and she was gone when they returned, the friends said. But Martin is weary of that account, saying their "stories changed over and over."
"Police believe Kenneka let herself into the walk-in cooler while she was drunk and died inside," WXIN reported.
Martin and her older daughter have a different take on Jenkins’ death.
“I believe someone in this hotel killed my child,” Martin said.
“The freezer door is heavy. So there’s no way. If they’re saying she’s drunk, she don’t have no strength. If she had enough strength to open that freezer door, she would have had enough strength to walk straight,” Harris said.
Police told Martin they saw a drunk Jenkins on surveillance camera.
“She can barely hold herself up (in the video). She’s like holding onto the rail, walking along the wall,” Martin recalled.
The cause of death has yet to be determined.
Brianna Chambers contributed to this report.
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