A Chicago hospital worker and her father have been found shot dead – after the woman’s 2-year-old son appeared to be alone when he answered a FaceTime call from a concerned colleague.
Javonni Jenkins, 27, and her father Curtis Hardman, 79, were discovered dead Wednesday at their apartment on South Drexel Avenue in the city’s South End, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.
Jenkins’ colleagues at Holy Cross Hospital became concerned when she failed to show up for work and they were unable to contact her.
His colleague Nicole Worth finally had someone take a FaceTime call on her phone – Jenkins’ 2-year-old son, CJ.
“I could see he had no clothes on. He was just in a diaper. So now something is wrong,” Worth said.
The colleague then asked the police to carry out a wellness check on the family.
Worth and several other friends and colleagues also rushed to the scene, where police entered the apartment around 10.50am and made the gruesome discovery.
Jenkins and Hardman had been fatally shot. The child was unharmed.
“The whole time I had the baby on the phone, he was very happy playing with his toys,” Worth told the outlet.
“Once I had this baby on the phone, and after a while without the parents calling [for] baby, you don’t hear that – there’s something wrong,” she said.
“We arrived a little too late,” said the distressed woman. “We saved the baby. That’s all we could do.
No one has been arrested in the shocking crime, which Deputy Chief of Police Sonora Ben said appears to be an isolated incident.
“I don’t think the public should be worried,” Ben told a news conference.
Worth, who worked with Jenkins as a medical assistant at the hospital, said she last saw the woman and CJ on Tuesday night and didn’t sense anything was wrong. not, NBC Chicago reported.
When Jenkins’ friends and colleagues visited the apartment on Wednesday morning, they noticed the door was unlocked before police entered, Worth told the outlet.
“[The cops] gave us the baby,” said a friend who was with Worth at the apartment, speaking on condition of anonymity. “They gave us CJ and then we went downstairs until they came in and informed us that [Jenkins] was gone.”
Jenkins’ cousin, Germaine Owens, said her parents had “no enemy in this world”, adding that “for someone to commit suicide, you have to be a demon or a monster”.
Friends said Jenkins was raised by her father after her mother died as a baby, the Sun-Times reported.
“That girl had a heart of gold,” Worth told the newspaper. “She wore her heart on her sleeve. She had a smile that would light up a room. You never saw her fall. You knew when something was bothering her, but she didn’t talk about it much, just brush it off.
Jenkins’ half-sister Angela Brooks mourned her late father, saying he was the type of father “every little girl dreams of”.
She told the Sun-Times that she “never heard my dad have an argument, raise his voice, or get upset.”
Brooks added: “I know my dad died protecting my little sister. He was a hero. »
Hardman’s ex-wife said her ex-husband will babysit CJ while Jenkins is at work.
“He was a big-hearted person,” Cherry Hardman told the newspaper. “He would help anyone. I could call him and say, ‘Curtis, can you come do this for me?’ and he was like, ‘OK, give me a minute.’ He helped anyone.
The grieving family say they have received no information about the crime.
The Post contacted the Chicago police.
