- Khloe was unidentified for 14 days after her body was found, despite her mother’s efforts to locate her.
- Police believe Khloe was targeted, but have not explained the evidence or circumstances around her death.
- The family deserves answers about the timeline and investigation, which they say lacks transparency and communication.
Something about the timeline surrounding 15-year-old Khloe McDonel’s death is not sitting right, and her grieving Jackson, Mississippi family deserves answers that go beyond “it was complicated.”
Khloe was reported missing July 18 after she was last seen the day before. Two days later, Capitol Police found a teenage girl suffering from a fatal gunshot wound to the head at Shepard’s Park in Jackson. The girl was unidentified, and the investigation was treated as a homicide. The problem is that the unidentified teenager was Khloe, and her mother had no idea.
WJTV reports that Capitol Police believe Khloe was targeted, which immediately raises a whole new set of questions. If investigators believe somebody specifically wanted this teenager dead, what led them to that conclusion? Was she lured to the park? Was someone tracking her? Did investigators find evidence indicating she knew her killer? And perhaps the biggest question of all, how did a missing teenager remain unidentified for so long after her body was discovered?
According to WLBT, Khloe’s mother, Nekomia Quinn, spent days searching for her daughter and even contacted the morgue after learning that a teenage girl had been found dead. Quinn says she repeatedly provided her contact information, yet nobody called to tell her that the unidentified girl could potentially be her missing child. In the subsequent days, a detective reportedly showed up unexpectedly at Quinn’s home to collect DNA. Ms. Quinn says she was told not to panic and that the sample was essentially precautionary. But if authorities already had an unidentified teenage homicide victim and knew Quinn had a missing teenage daughter, it’s fair to wonder why that connection apparently didn’t happen sooner.
“I’m not understanding, okay, how can y’all identify another woman in the park through a picture, but couldn’t identify Khloe in the picture,” she said, reports WLBT. “So it’s not making no sense to me.”
“For me to hear that, hey, that was your daughter the whole time — it’s just disappointing. It’s very disappointing.”
The Mississippi State Crime Laboratory eventually confirmed the DNA match. Khloe’s family was notified 16 days after she was reported missing and 14 days after her body was discovered. Capitol Police says the family was notified once the identification was confirmed and that investigators had been communicating with Jackson police. The agency also says its policy is to notify next of kin as soon as practicable after a positive identification. But “as soon as practicable” is going to mean something very different to a grieving mother who was actively searching for her child.
Khloe’s family now wants to know who targeted her, why she was killed and, perhaps just as importantly, why it took investigators two weeks to connect a missing 15-year-old girl to an unidentified teenage homicide victim.
That timeline deserves some serious explaining.
