The Bellefonte Police Department said Scranton police are "fairly confident" that a body found in the Lackawanna River on Sept. 20 is not that of missing Centre County District Attorney Ray Gricar.
Bellefonte police Officer Darrel Zaccagni said police have no new information about the body that was found in Lackawanna River in a dry riverbed almost two weeks ago.
"[Scranton police] were fairly confident that the individual they found is a missing man from Carbondale," Zaccagni said. "The family [of the Carbondale man] was there and identified the couple bits of clothing as the right size for that man."
Zaccagni said that if the man is not identified as the missing Carbondale man, police will then compare the body to Gricar.
Lackawanna County coroner's assistant Ann Berardelli said DNA has been taken on the body and results are expected in about two to three weeks.
"If it comes back negative, there are other people we will test for," Berardelli said. "There are other people who have called in about other missing persons, and we have been taking names."
Berardelli said the coroner was just notified of the Gricar case a few days ago, so Gricar will be one of the comparisons done if this test is negative.
But she added that it is up to the coroner to determine when the comparisons would be completed for each person.
Zaccagni said police departments investigate any information they receive on body discoveries before they pass the information on to the family.
"There has been a number [of bodies] that we have looked at and through one means or another figured out that it's not Ray," Zaccagni said. "We might tell the family about [a body that was investigated] afterwards but not until we get something a little more. We don't always run and tell them that someone has found a body."
Gricar's nephew, Tony Gricar, said there have been seven to eight bodies found that he knows of since his uncle's April 15 disappearance. He added that Bellefonte police did not notify him of the body found in the Lackawanna River.
"As a family, we just don't speculate on every body," he said.
