CHICAGO — A Cook County judge cleared the way Friday for family members to claim the body of a woman found dead Oct. 27 in the stairwell of a South Loop apartment building.
A spokesperson for the family of 36-year-old Caitlin Tracey said a local judge had issued a temporary restraining order on her remains while a judge in Michigan decided whether her parents had the authority to claim her body since they were in that state. state lived. time of her death. Tracey’s husband of six months, Adam Beckerink, wanted to claim her body, but the family won after a Michigan judge ruled in their favor this week.
Meanwhile, the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office has not ruled on the cause and manner of Tracey’s death, crucial information that could help police and prosecutors decide whether there was a criminal element to her death.
According to the spokesperson, Beckerink reported his wife missing on October 26, the day before she was found with a severed foot at the bottom of the stairwell.
While filing that report, Beckerink told investigators that he had not seen his wife in about a month, but investigators found a video of them together two days earlier: reports the Sun-Times.
The spokesperson said Tracey was found dead two days before a jury trial was set to begin in Michigan, where Beckerink faced misdemeanor charges for interfering with Tracey’s attempts to call 911 and then “violently resisting” arresting officers. A second domestic violence case, also filed this year, was also pending in Michigan, the spokesperson said.
While Tracey lived in New Buffalo, Michigan at the time of her death, she was staying with Beckerink when she died, the family said.
Beckerink has not been charged or charged with any wrongdoing in connection with Tracey’s death. He has never been charged with any crime in Cook County, according to court records.
However, Tracey filed for a protective order in Cook County last year, alleging that Beckerink “contacts me about 20 times a day” and calls her “derogatory names like ‘liar,’ cheater, ‘whore,’ and a ‘piece of shit.’ . T.'”
She also alleged that she filed a domestic violence complaint in September 2023 after, she said, Beckerink entered a hotel room at the Ritz Carlton while she was sleeping and was verbally and physically abusive.
Tracey said she filed a second report because, she alleged, Beckerink was physically and verbally abused at the South Loop residential building in August 2023, “with my head against a closet, hitting me, punching me, my head in a headlock setting, and dragged me away from the door.
In a third allegation, she alleged that Beckerink hit her over the head with a pickle jar at her Michigan home in July 2023. She claimed she fled the home after he “poured vodka on my body, burning my wounds.” Two days later he took the woman to a hospital for treatment of her ‘open head wound’, Tracey claimed.
Her affidavit stated that she took police to Beckerink’s home after the incident in August 2023: “The police officers attempted to arrest the man [man]but he refused to open the door,” she wrote.
Tracey received the protective order, but it was revoked about a month later.
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