A year after his only sister was murdered along a rural road in Havre de Grace, Rob Abramowicz grieved once again when state police identified the remains of his missing father in a Cecil County forest.
The skeletal remains of Robert Abramowicz, 81, were found Saturday by a hunter walking through a ravine in Elk Neck State Forest near Irishtown Road, said Gregory Shipley, state police spokesman.
Last year, Robert Abramowicz?s only daughter, Lillian Abramowicz Phelps, became a victim of a suspected Harford County serial killer.
“When we got the initial call Saturday evening, it stirred up a lot of bad memories,” said Rob Abramowicz, Robert?s son and Lillian?s brother. “Now I feel a little more relief, and my mother?s feeling a little better by the day.”
Dental records identified Robert Abramowicz, who had suffered from Alzheimer?s and wandered more than a mile from his home on the 900 block of Irishtown Road in July 2005.
Rob Abramowicz thought his father, a concentration camp survivor and former member of the British Royal Air Force, might have believed he was back in Poland during World War II, and fled into the woods at the sound of gunfire from a nearby firing range.
“It was kind of a kick in the butt to realize how close he was to home, and we didn?t find him,” Rob Abramowicz said.
Phelps? body was found in June 2006 outside Havre de Grace, and 35-year-old Charles Eugene Burns was convicted this April of her murder. Burns is suspected but has not been charged in the deaths of three other women.
Shipley said the state medical examiner had not yet ruled on the cause and manner of Robert Abramowicz?s death, but investigators from the state police homicide division did not suspect foul play.
“On the day I went to the Maryland State Police to file a missing-person?s report, I began to relive all of the emotions and pains of my dear husband, who is missing,” Jadwiga Abramowicz, 77, said before Burns was sentenced to life in prison. “This feeling is too powerful to describe.”
