Kenneka Jenkins is not missing, but parallels are being drawn between her mysterious freezer death and how the FBI investigates high-profile cases involving missing white women.
Jenkins, a black Chicago teenager, was found “frozen solid” inside a storage freezer in an unused kitchen at the 4-star Crowne Plaza O’Hare Hotel in Rosemont, Illinois on Sunday, Sept. 10.
The FBI declined to get involved when Jenkins’ mother, Teresa Martin, asked the federal agency to step in and take over the investigation after a series of public missteps by the Rosemont Police.
An online petition pressuring the Rosemont Police to give the case to the FBI has collected over 36,000 signatures as of Friday morning, but the Rosemont police chief has refused to request the federal agency’s assistance.
It is impossible to ignore “the white woman syndrome” that compels the FBI to hastily intervene in high-profile cases involving the deaths of white women.
In one rare exception, the feds investigated the jail death of Sandra Bland in 2015. But, as News One points out, the feds have a habit of ignoring cases involving deaths of black women regardless of the circumstances.
via News One — The “missing White woman syndrome” phenomena was validated by a sociologist and crime expert at Northwestern University who told NPR’s Gene Demby that “White women were much more likely to be the subject of news coverage relative to their proportions among missing persons, and women in general, were significantly more likely than men to be covered.”
When the FBI joins a local police force’s investigation, they offer more resources and have access to better technology and labs than the local police department.
The FBI recently completed its investigation into the case of Rita Maze, a Montana woman who was found shot dead in the trunk of her car in Spokane, Washington on September 6, 2016.
The FBI determined that Maze died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after frantically calling her family and saying she had been abducted from a gas station.
Like Jenkins, Maze died alone under mysterious circumstances. But unlike Jenkins, Maze was white.
