19-year-old Girl Found Murdered And Stuffed Inside Hotel Freezer

A 19-year-old West Side woman was found dead inside a walk-in freezer at a Rosemont hotel Sunday morning, about a day after she had gone missing from a party she attended with friends, police and her family said. She is alleged to have been murdered before being stuffed into the hotel freezer.

According to Chicago Tribune, the woman identified as Kenneka Jenkins was discovered after an hours long search and was pronounced dead at 12:48 a.m. Sunday, according to the Cook County medical examiner’s office.

The mother of the deceased, Tereasa Martin, said police told her Jenkins apparently let herself into the freezer while inebriated and died inside. An autopsy was performed Sunday, said Becky Schlikerman, spokeswoman for the medical examiner’s office, but it wasn’t immediately clear whether foul play was suspected in Jenkins’ death. The cause and manner of the teen’s death were not determined Sunday.

Speaking to reporters outside the hotel Sunday morning, Martin said she was having trouble understanding what happened.

“(I’m) horrified,” she said. “It’s something that no one could ever imagine. It’s unbelievable.”

Daniel Pena, a manager at the hotel, referred questions about the incident to Rosemont police Sunday.

“Anyone can understand how a parent can feel distraught over the loss of a child and feel the need to lash out due to the tremendous pain they’re feeling, and we can certainly understand that,” Mack said. “But people can rest assured Rosemont is one of the top, highest trained, most respected police departments in the state of Illinois and does a good job at what they do.

“Every situation has a lot of variables, and certainly this one did,” he said. “The hotel has probably never seen anything like this, either, I would imagine.”

Martin said she thought Rosemont police also failed to heed the family’s frantic attempts to figure out what happened to Jenkins.

“If they had taken me seriously and checked right away, they could have found my daughter much sooner and she might have been alive,” Martin said.