A man pulled from the Des Plaines River near the Barrypoint Road bridge last May has been identified as 27-year-old Grzegorz Tulicki, of Melrose Park. His death has been ruled a suicide, said Riverside Police Chief Thomas Weitzel, who was notified of the man’s identification by an Illinois State Police investigator on Friday.
Tulicki was identified through fingerprint records, said Weitzel. At the time of his death, the Cook County Sheriff had a warrant out for his arrest for failure to appear in court to answer for a driving under the influence arrest in March 2010.
Weitzel said that, according to the state investigator, just days before he was pulled from the river, Tulicki had scrawled a suicide note in chalk in front of his parents’ home on the 2200 block of North 19th Avenue in Melrose Park.
The man’s parents never notified police that their son was missing, Weitzel said, believing him to be in jail.
“He probably went into the water near his residence,” Weitzel added.
A call by the Landmark to the Illinois State Police Zone 1 investigations division was not returned.
Tulicki’s body was spotted drifting downstream above the Hofmann Dam by an off-duty Riverside firefighter about 8 a.m. on Sunday, May 16. The body went over the dam and got caught in the “boil.” Tulicki’s body was eventually pulled from the river on the south bank, just east of the Barrypoint bridge.
The body was badly decomposed and police found no identification. At the time, the Cook County Medical Examiner declared the cause of death “inconclusive, pending further studies.”
No further information was available Monday from the medical examiner’s office.
-Bob Uphues