Holiday Inn on elkridge landing rd in 1975. I used to go there then on weekends to listen and dance to live bands.
It was the only and closest hotel to the airport which was Friendship airport then as well.
Jmo
Thanks for sharing about having been there back in the day. It's great to get a local account from someone who had experience with the location and remembers it from (I assume, approximately) this time / decade. Your account gives me a more vivid picture of the place - live music on weekends, dancing, perhaps a "party" type of atmosphere.
People quite likely drinking and taking recreational drugs. Meeting guests staying at the hotel, likely coming from all over. If it was, as you said, the only hotel in the vicinity of the airport (as a native Marylander I was aware it used to be Friendship Airport), makes sense that it would be a major meeting place and stopping point for tired travelers from every US state and nationality outside the US imaginable, wanting a convenient place to rest for the night, and that locals would find it a fun place to go, especially if they were teens who were maybe too young for the bars or there wasn't much in the way of other nightlife available to them back then.
Given your description it's also not a far stretch for me to imagine illicit activities going on there, perhaps if not in plain view than behind the scenes, where people used the Holiday Inn for drug deals, prostitution, etc. in the rooms.
There could have been many reasons this guy found himself deceased in that room - he could have been invited up there by a guest and took some drug(s) that proved fatal, perhaps triggering a possible underlying medical condition even in a small dose, and when he died the guest staying in that room simply panicked and didn't know what to do, or didn't want to be held responsible or get in trouble for admittedly possessing drugs and/or giving them to others.
As there were no marks or signs of physical violence on the body, I think this can easily be classified as an accidental death rather than deliberate homicide or suicide. And someone out there is surely missing a son or brother. I guarantee someone related to this young man is wondering from time to time whatever happened to my big brother or older cousin - perhaps he was a teen runaway and had been living like that for years, estranged from the family and involved in the drug scene - and his relatives deserve answers.
DNA will be the best bet of course, and I believe his is in CODIS.