CHICAGO — The parents of a woman found dead in the stairwell of a South Loop luxury high-rise are asking a judge to block the woman’s husband from claiming her remains.
A resident found Caitlin Tracey, 36, at the bottom of an internal stairwell in the 1200 block of South Prairie around 7:25 p.m. on Sunday, October 27. Her severed foot was found nearby. The Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office conducted an autopsy, but the results are still pending as of Saturday morning.
Now, Tracey’s parents, citing an “alleged violent pattern of abuse,” have won a temporary restraining order to prevent her husband, Adam Beckerink, from taking custody of her remains.
Another hearing on the matter is scheduled for next week.
While Chicago police investigators have questioned Beckerink in connection with Tracey’s death, he has never been criminally charged with any wrongdoing of any kind in Cook County.
However, Cook County court records show Tracey filed and received an order of protection against Beckerink, an attorney, in October 2023. The order was dismissed the following month, and records show that she had not filed another petition in Cook County since then.
Those records list the Prairie Avenue building as Beckerink’s home address.
In an affidavit seeking the order, Tracey claimed Beckerink “contacts me approximately twenty times a day” and calls her “derogatory names like ‘liar,’ cheater,’ ‘whore,’ and a ‘piece of sh*t.’”
She also claimed that she filed a police report for domestic battery in September 2023 after, she said, Beckerink came into a hotel room at the Ritz Carlton while she was sleeping and launched into verbal and physical abuse.
Tracey said she filed a second police report because, she claimed, Beckerink became physically and verbally abusive at the South Loop residential building in August 2023, “slamming my head against a cabinet, slapping me, punching me, putting my head on a headlock, and dragging me away from the door.”
In a third allegation, she claimed that Beckerink struck her in the head with a pickle jar at her Michigan home in July 2023. She alleged that she fled the residence after he “poured vodka on my body, which burned my wounds.” He took the woman to a hospital for treatment of her “open head wound” two days later, Tracey alleged.
Her affidavit said she took police to the Beckerink’s residence after the August 2023 incident: “The police officers attempted to arrest the [man], but he refused to open the door,” she wrote.
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