The family of 19-year-old Kenneka Jenkins, who died after being locked inside a freezer at a Rosemont hotel in 2017, will receive more than $6 million in a wrongful death settlement.
The resolution comes more than six years after Jenkins died at the Crowne Plaza Chicago-O’Hare hotel in Rosemont, Ill. She went to the hotel in September of 2017 to attend a late-night party on the ninth floor. But she never came home — and after nearly 24 hours of uncertainty, her body was found in a freezer in a commercial kitchen space. The cause of death was determined to be hypothermia.
Her mother filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the hotel’s parent company, security firm, and restaurant in 2018, claiming staff were negligent because they didn’t secure the walk-in freezer or conduct a proper search when Jenkins went missing.
A settlement agreement was reached in August, according to court records, but terms of the deal were not made public until Tuesday, when the case had been scheduled to go to trial.
