Officials rule "no foul play" in the bizarre disappearance and freezer death of 19-year-old Kenneka Jenkins (shown below) at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Rosemont, Illinois last month.
According to autopsy and toxicology tests, Jenkins succumbed to "hypothermia" after mistakenly wandering into an unused walk-in freezer at the Crowne Plaza hotel -- while in a drunken stupor -- on the morning of September 9, 2017.
Medical examiners contend that the teen's inebriated condition, and the speed with which she froze to death once locked inside the cold unit, was "exacerbated" by her recreational use of a drug typically prescribed for seizures and migraines.
They say the two substances are "synergistic" and combined to create a toxic mix that "disoriented" young Jenkins, fatally leading to her "confusion and impaired" decision to pry open the massive doors of a 34-degree freezer compartment herself and then close them behind her.
Searchers eventually found her trapped inside the frigid chamber, face down and long dead of overexposure, some 24 hours later.
A number of lesions detected postmortem in Jenkins' stomach are consistent with someone who's frozen to death, medical examiners have noted in the report they released on Friday. However, the victim's brain was also "swollen," and bruises and abrasions on at least one of her legs haven't been satisfactorily explained either.
Allegedly, every misstep of Kenneka Jenkins' fateful journey to an unguarded kitchen area where the deadly walk-in freezer was situated had been filmed on hotel surveillance cameras, except for the moment she entered the icebox.
Curiously, though, some of the hotel's CCTV footage that day has yet to be turned over for inspection; most importantly, video from a cam positioned “near the upstairs abandoned kitchen" where Ms. Jenkins met her icy end.
Relatives are therefore challenging the recent findings of "accidental death" as well as the initial reluctance of hotel management and police to search for Kenneka between September 9th and 10th, when her family and friends had repeatedly reported the girl inexplicably missing.
“I want to see it all," Jenkin's mother angrily responded this week to reporters questioning the 'no foul play' ruling in her daughter's sudden disappearance and unusual demise. "I want to see her actually walking into this freezer and closing herself within this freezer and freezing to death.”
case update by EPONYMOUS ROX
