Services have been arranged for a suburban mother of two who was tragically killed in a "random" drive-by shooting on a Wisconsin interstate while returning from a popular water park with her family.
A visitation for Tracy Czaczkowski will be held Friday from 3-8 p.m. at the Glueckert Funeral Home in Arlington Heights. A funeral is scheduled for Saturday at noon at St. Edna's Catholic Church.
Czaczkowski, of Buffalo Grove, was fatally shot over the weekend while in a car with her husband, an employee with the Drug Enforcement Administration, and two children as the family returned home to Illinois from the Wisconsin Dells. She died two days after the apparently random attack.
Zachary T. Hays, 20, was charged in her murder Wednesday. Hays faces one count of first-degree intentional homicide and three counts of first-degree recklessly endangering safety.
A criminal complaint filed Wednesday against Hays showed that his brother, 30-year-old Jeremy Hays, who was in the car at the time, told detectives that he "had been acting extremely paranoid" after smoking marijuana four days earlier.
Hays was allegedly particularly paranoid about cars with tinted windows, like the one the Czaczkowski family was in.
Hays was hospitalized after his vehicle was stopped on Interstate 90/94 near DeForest, Wisconsin, using spike strips and ultimately shot by two Columbia County Sheriff’s deputies after refusing to drop his gun, authorities said. His condition was not immediately known.
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Jeremy Hays is being held on a tentative charge of felon in possession of a firearm, police said. Another brother also in the car was not being named "due to his cognitive disability."
Dennis Wichern, a special agent in charge of the Chicago's DEA field division, called the shooting "the most tragic incident I've ever seen in my 30 years of being in law enforcement."
"This one makes no sense," he said. "It's tragic, it's senseless, and it just goes to show you how precious life is at times."
Those wishing to assist the children with future needs such as education are asked to visit the family's GoFundMe page, the agency said.
