A Tragic Mystery

It has been a hot minute since I have blogged, however I felt inspired recently. I read the news … a lot. I follow stories to see their progress, one story in particular has stayed with me, that is the one of the sad and mysterious death of 19-year-old Kenneka Jenkins.

If you’re not familiar, the young woman went out with her friends on a Friday night. Their destination and party spot was a hotel. Ms. Jenkins like a lot of young people, had some drinks, got separated from her friends and ended up in the walk in freezer of a seldom used catering kitchen of the hotel.

It’s a hotel, right, there’s video, right? Yes. There is. It’s everywhere on the internet. However, unless there is something not made public, we never see her walk into the freezer. We see her in the kitchen, but that’s where it ends.

There is just something not adding up on this one.

The surveillance shows her stumbling around, unable to stand. Yet, a video of her partying shows a young woman who appeared be sober.

How did she get to be in such an inebriated state? Admittedly, when I first saw the surveillance, my mind immediately went to a paranormal explanation. It scared me. It reminded me of Elisa Lam.

Hotel, surveillance, both young women seemingly talking to someone else.

After my initial, ‘oh stop, it isn’t a vengeful ghost beckoning her’, I couldn’t help but shake the feeling that she was following someone or someone was calling out to her, “This way. I’m here. Help me.”

She is looking around, even seems to have direction. Enter the kitchen … fade out.

Uh, I worked in a kitchen. How did she open that Freezer door in that condition, those doors are not light.

Let’s assume that she made it into that kitchen, opened that heavy door, stumbled inside and passed out.

Here’s where the injustice comes in.

We know she was alive at 3:20 am. Her friends are already searching frantically for her, after they have no luck, scared to death, they call Kenneka’s mom. She hightails it right over. Of course she did, this is her child, her baby. It was only a couple hours before hand that she said what we all say to our grown children when they leave, “Be careful, I love you.”

Mrs. Martin, Kenneka’s mom, probably tried to stay calm. Still, she’s a mom.. You know damn well, at five in the morning she is pleading with the hotel people, ‘Just look at the footage. Please, look at the footage.”

And they … refused. Yeah, they wouldn’t do it. I don’t get why. Mrs. Martin wasn’t asking to see the footage, she wanted them to look.

She would have to wait and file a missing person’s report, and then it would be twelve hours since Kenneka was last seen alive before the search would commence and near another twelve hours after a search started that they’d find her.

You may think twelve hours is not a lot, but it is when you’re in a freezer.

Rules be damned. What was wrong with these hotel people that they couldn’t have someone come in and pull the footage. No compassion? No heartstrings with a frantic mother?

Even if they had to wait until seven in the morning for security, they could have done it.

The friends knew when they were separated, it would have been easy to find her on the footage.  They would see where she was last. The kitchen.

When our children are little they hide and often fall asleep. As parents we learn to check the danger zones, Washer, dryer, car, oven, Freezer … check these places first.

Why didn’t they.

Had they pulled the footage when Mrs. Martin pled, had they just been human, at most, only four hours would have passed and Kenneka would be alive. Frost bitten, suffering from Hypothermic, but alive.

That alone is an injustice. Again, things just don’t add up and I refuse to believe it was a simple case of a drunken girl stumbling into a freezer. It ceased to be simple, when they failed to add an ounce or urgency, compassion and common sense into looking for the girl.  To me, they dismissed her as some wild party girl and they didn’t give a damn. That was wrong. She is a human being.

Kenneka is not alone in stories such as these. Kendrick Johnson who was reported missing and found in a wrestling matt at his school, Elisa Lam, who went missing in the hotel and found in the water tank on the roof, Richard Potter, missing for eight months and despite all his wife’s pleas to check the airport garage, finally 8 months later they did and there he was.

Now, there are comments to the extreme of both sides of the Kenneka story. People are mean, they really are. The internet and the ability to be anonymous brings out the heartless bastards in so many people.

Why? It’s not them. It’s not their friend, their child. They don’t care and that’s a shame. They should.

A young girl died. She died and she shouldn’t be dead.

I think the worst comments that say the mother is only after money. This was her child, IS her child. A part of her soul was ripped from her being. An agony unimaginable. She doesn’t want money, she wants answers and deserves them. I pray she keeps up her strength and search until answers are found, because I truly believe there is more to this story.