EAST CHICAGO | A body found floating in the Indiana Harbor and Ship Canal last month has been identified as a missing East Chicago man.

Investigators with the Indiana State Police laboratory confirmed Tuesday that the decomposed body found May 5 near the Dickey Road drawbridge was that of Robert Ricky Johnson, a 57-year-old Calumet neighborhood resident.

Johnson was last seen April 13, when police responding to a call about a trespasser in a 151st Street scrap yard reported that he either jumped or fell into the south branch of the canal while running from officers.

DNA from a rib bone of the body found three weeks later matched a tissue sample taken from Johnson in the course of a 2006 criminal conviction, according to the state laboratory's report.

Johnson's family formally reported him as a missing person April 25.

His body was found more than two miles north of where police reported seeing him struggling against a strong current in the frigid waters, finally slipping beneath the surface and not coming back up again.

A helicopter and divers with the Lake County Sheriff's Department and a sonar-equipped boat from the Indiana Department of Natural Resources searched the canal -- considered to be the most polluted waterway in the Great Lakes ecosystem -- for Johnson without success.