do you ever feel like this should be officially the end

For anyone who knows me, it will come as no surprise that I have a minor obsession with serial killers. Now, I'm a lot better than I used to be--I haven't read the two encyclopedias I own on them for years now, and I can no longer recite any of seventy-odd histories of pain, brutality and death when tossed a name. I think this is actually a healthier thing, so I'm not overly encouraging myself to pick it back up as a hobby.

But I still keep my hand in, in certain specific areas. I like watching "true crime" documentaries on Netflix and YouTube. I've been a subscriber of LordanArts for his "BrainScratch" series for years, as well as Ranil Gort, Mortis Media, Gloomy House, ScareMe, Luth Luther, Scary Mysteries, Deburke321, Scare Theater, and Ask a Mortician, because she's a lot of fun. I'm so in love with one creator's work (Cayleigh Elise, she used to write and edit for Rob Gavagan before she branched out on her own video series) that I became part of her Patreon just to support her. What she does kills her heart, but she's driven to cover it--mostly Jane Doe cases (cases so old they may never be solved because the killers and any remaining family members who might know what happened have died) and cases of missing children--because, in many cases, getting the word out has led to breakthroughs on these open investigations.

Why am I telling you all this? Because last night, I fell down the rabbit hole on YouTube.

Now, this isn't hard to do--pick a topic, there's a strange wild path to follow down--but this one turned up some interesting things.

I started with Shauna Rae, who'd put up a fascinating video about a strange hiking mishap in Panama.  Watched a couple of hers, then from there, I discovered Samantha M, who apparently focuses on Australian cases of foul play. I watched a few of hers, and then in the sidebar, saw a mention of Stephanie Harlowe's coverage of the Kenneka Jenkins case. The description of that video led me to Gray Hughes Investigations, who apparently has an entire playlist devoted to Kenneka Jenkins--the actual facts, the suppositions, and all the conspiracy theories. It's exhaustive.

Now, if you've never heard about Kenneka Jenkins, it is truly one of the more heartbreaking cases out there--but it was not a murder. It was an extraordinarily unfortunate accident--Ms. Jenkins had gone to a party while taking a prescription drug that severely impairs cognition when in the presence of alcohol, and genetically, she had a predisposition to getting drunk anyway. What an equivalent girl would need six beers to achieve, Kenneka could reach in half of one bottle. Some people are just wired that way.

But both these factors combined to lead her out of the party a few minutes after her friends left to get her cell phone charger from her mother's car, which she had taken to the hotel where the party was. In surveillance footage, she is obviously intoxicated. From what I personally know about the prescription drug she was taking (it has a lot of off-brand uses, but my bet is, she was given it to prevent migraines), this drug both induces short-term memory loss as well as balance issues. Pair that with alcohol, and her inebriated decision to go find her friends in the lobby (but having hit the button in the elevator for "LL", which she very well may have blurrily seen as "L"), the end result was a 19-year-old girl wandering aimlessly through the administration sector of the hotel, trying to find her way out.

The major oddity in this case is that, after several minutes of wandering brought her to an unfinished kitchen area, she found the door to a (mysteriously active, though not perfectly working) walk-in freezer, and...walked in. And the door shut behind her. This is, absolutely, tragic happenstance. And--again, absolutely, no question of this--had the police officer with whom her mother spoke, trying to get them to come to the hotel to search for her daughter, not essentially blown it off as "hey, kids wander off, c'mon, she's an adult"--maybe, maybe, there is a vanishingly slim chance she could have been revived.

But understand, at the time Kenneka's mother became involved, she had already been trapped in a pitch-black walk-in freezer for four hours. She may have already died at that point. Or, if she hadn't, she may have, when revived, had so much brain damage that she would never have been off a ventilator. We just don't know, and we'll never know.

But the case was officially ruled an accident. Could the hotel have done more, by calling someone in upper management to send security in to review the surveillance tapes? Of course. Could the police officer Kenneka's mother spoke with have evidenced just a smidge more empathy for the situation, and sent a car by? Obviously. That neither of these things were done is also tragic, but again, by the time the hotel staff was asked to review the tapes, Kenneka may have already been dead. We have no way of knowing how fast it took her to freeze to death in the walk-in.

And yes, while this case does spur some dim echoes of Elisa Lam, in all other aspects they are vastly different cases. Ms. Lam was traveling alone, not with friends; Ms. Lam, while she was taking prescription drugs to balance her bipolar syndrome and diagnosed depression, was not taking anything that could have caused any amnesiac effects; and while she did have anti-psychotic rescue medication with her, and evidence from the toxicology report suggests she had not taken them for several days, it wasn't something she was used to taking every day.

There will always be the mystery of how, exactly, she went through a locked door onto the roof and climbed into an open water tank without a ladder on the side, but...everything else, including her behavior in the hotel's elevator, is simple happenstance. We will never know how everything happened in Ms. Lam's case either, but Kenneka Jenkins' case, at least, has far less disturbing, surreal aspects. It is a heartbreaking tragedy, but it is the tragedy of a sort that happens every day.

At any rate, I just wanted to cover some of these channels, in a minor way. That's all. If you're not interested in criminal activity, murders, and disturbing cases, you don't have to click any of the links. Not everyone is, and that's perfectly fine.