The family of a 19-year-old Black woman found dead inside a Chicago-area hotel freezer six years ago will get over $6 million reached in a wrongful death settlement.
News of a settlement surfaced in October, but specifics were not revealed until the case was set to go to trial, after it appeared recent settlement negotiations were failing. According to NPR, Tereasa Martin filed the now-settled lawsuit in 2018, accusing the Crowne Plaza Chicago-O’Hare hotel in Rosemont, Illinois, its security company and others of being careless and failing to do more to locate her daughter, Kenneka Jenkins, before she died of hypothermia after becoming trapped inside its walk-in commercial kitchen freezer.
The settlement’s total is $10 million, the Chicago Sun-Times reported, with nearly $3.5 million for attorneys’ costs and payment for Martin’s representation and over $6,000 earmarked for Jenkins’ funeral. Martin will receive a significant portion of the money, and two other relatives will each receive over $1 million each.
“My life will never be the same,” said Martin in her lawsuit filing, adding that if the hotel had done things differently, her daughter may still be alive.
Martin claims she became concerned, then desperate, when her family lost communication with her daughter in the early hours of Saturday, Sept. 9, 2017. Martin could not contact Jenkins after 1 a.m. once she’d arrived in Room 926 at the Crowne Plaza Chicago-O’Hare for a late-night party. Jenkins’ relatives and friends told hotel officials that she was missing at about 2:30 a.m.
“By this time, Jenkins had wandered out into the hotel and left her cell phone upstairs,” said Martin’s attorneys in a statement. “Hotel surveillance videos reveal that she had walked downstairs in an obviously disoriented state and was seen by multiple staff members as she was walking toward the freezer, though no one stopped her.”
Martin’s attorneys, citing video footage from in-house cameras, said a hotel employee who stepped into the freezer at 10:30 p.m. Saturday night overlooked Jenkins inside.
Martin claimed that hotel and security officials did not analyze video footage quickly enough to assist in the search for her daughter, who was discovered after nearly 24 hours of searching in an underused freezer in what her legal team characterized as an under-construction kitchen. She also claimed that personnel neglected to intervene in the ninth-floor party, which had provoked multiple complaints from hotel guests.
The autopsy report said that the freezer door had a mechanism to open it from the inside, but it did not explain why the young woman would not have been able to escape the fatal cold. Martin’s legal team believes someone outside the freezer sealed the door — which they claim should have been locked in the first place — without realizing Jenkins was inside.
The Cook County medical examiner’s office deemed Jenkins’ death accidental, adding that intoxication from alcohol and topiramate, a drug used to treat epilepsy and migraine headaches, “were significant contributing factors,” NPR reported.
Rosemont police officers agreed with the accidental death determination.
Jenkins’ death attracted widespread attention and generated various conspiracy theories. It also highlighted the disproportionate rate at which Black people, particularly women and young Black girls, go missing in the United States each year.
“It hurts,” Martin said when she filed the lawsuit. “It’s a pain that I can’t even explain. I don’t even understand.”
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