Family Of Woman Who Died In Hotel Freezer Awarded $6 Million

A 19-year-old woman died after being locked inside a locked freezer. Now, family has been awarded $6 million in a wrongful death settlement.

The trial in connection to the case was about to commence. However, the agreement was announced on Tuesday morning.

On September 10, 2017, Kenneka Jenkins was discovered dead inside a walk-in freezer. This had been inside an unused kitchen located at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Cook County, Illinois. The medical examiner had determined that her cause of death was hypothermia.

However, many on social media began to speak of conspiracy theories. What’s more, over 1,000 people attended her funeral.

Teresa Martin, Jenkins’s mother, had filed a lawsuit against the hotel, a security company, and a restaurant at the hotel. She had been requesting over $50 million.

Jenkins had been at a party in a room at the hotel and was exiting with friends at close to 2:30 a.m. She then saw that she didn’t have her phone, so her friends went to retrieve it. But, when they came back, she was gone.

Camera footage revealed Jenkins stumbling as she walked through the hotel. She was then seen going into the unused kitchen, and going around a corner in the direction of a walk-in freezer. This was at about 3:32 a.m., the lawsuit documents.

Around 4 a.m., Jenkins’s friends called her mother to inform her that they hadn’t seen her daughter since they had exited the room. The suit states that Martin contacted the hotel. They then told her that they would look at camera footage.

It took over 21 hours for Jenkins’s body to be discovered after she is thought to have gone in the freezer.

When authorities arrived to the hotel to look into the matter, the camera footage was looked at for the first time. The lawsuit expresses that neither the hotel nor security staff reviewed the surveillance cameras.

Additionally, if the hotel had effectively monitored the security cameras, Jenkins’s life would have been saved, the lawsuit noted.