Mother of US teenager found dead in walk-in freezer reaches $13.3m settlement

CHICAGO - The mother of a Chicago teenager who was found dead of hypothermia in a hotel’s walk-in freezer in 2017 agreed this week to a US$10 million (US$13.3 million) settlement, according to court records.

The teenager, Kenneka Jenkins, visited the Crowne Plaza Chicago-O’Hare Hotel in Rosemont, Illinois, around 1am Sept 9, 2017, according to a lawsuit that her mother, Tereasa Martin, filed against CPO Hospitality LLC, the organisation that oversees the hotel, and other parties.

Ms Jenkins, 19, was last seen by her friends around 2.30am, leaving a room on the ninth floor of the hotel after attending a party, according to the lawsuit.

After it was clear that Ms Jenkins was missing, hotel staff members assured her mother that they would “check and review all security cameras and footage,” according to the lawsuit.

But they failed to do so properly, the suit said. If they had, they would have seen Ms Jenkins “enter the kitchen, and would have been able to locate her which would have prevented her death,” according to the lawsuit.

In surveillance video footage, Ms Jenkins was “visibly disoriented, confused and lost within their premises” before entering an abandoned kitchen, where she later died in the freezer, according to the filing.

The defendants failed to properly secure the freezer, which had been in an unattended area of the hotel, and to stop the unlawful party that her daughter had attended at the hotel, according to the lawsuit.

The settlement, which was reached on Dec 12, included US$6,000 for Ms Jenkins’ funeral and around US$3.5 million for lawyers’ fees and costs.

Lawyers for Martin and CPO Hospitality did not respond to requests for comment.

The case prompted amateur sleuths to analyse widely circulated videos from the hotel party and to pay close attention to their audio and Ms Jenkins’ appearances in them.

Social media users criticised the police for acting too slowly, saying that had Ms Jenkins been white instead of black, law enforcement would have made investigating her disappearance a priority.

Police in Rosemont previously said that they had left “no stone unturned” during their investigation after she was reported missing.

The Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office ruled that Ms Jenkins died from hypothermia, and said that her death was an accident.

The office added that alcohol and topiramate, a prescription drug used to prevent migraines and to control seizures, were “significant contributing factors”. NYTIMES