Kennedy curse strikes again
RFK’s granddaughter found dead at family compound after suspected drug overdose
THE ‘curse’ of the Kennedy family has struck again after the granddaughter of Robert F Kennedy died of a suspected drug overdose.
Saoirse Kennedy Hill, 22 – whose grandfather was shot dead in 1968, five years after the assassination of his brother, US President John F Kennedy – was found dead at the family compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts.
Police are still investigating the cause of her death but the student had previously written of her struggles with depression.
Miss Kennedy Hill’s grandfather, known as Bobby, was shot dead in Los Angeles in 1968 as he was considering his own presidential run.
Members of the Kennedy family, one of America’s most influential clans, were seen hugging each other yesterday as they arrived at the compound to mourn.
They said in a joint statement: ‘Our hearts are shattered by the loss of our beloved Saoirse. Her life was filled with hope, promise and love. She cared deeply about her friends and family.
‘She lit up our lives with her love, her peals of laughter and her generous spirit. Saoirse was passionately moved by the causes of human rights and women’s empowerment and found great joy in volunteer work, working alongside indigenous communities to build schools in Mexico. We will love her and miss her for ever.’
Bobby Kennedy’s widow Ethel, 91, added: ‘The world is a little less beautiful today.’
The last photo of Miss Kennedy Hill was posted by a family member on Instagram over the weekend and showed her holding a rope as she posed on a yacht.
Miss Kennedy Hill was the daughter of Bobby and Ethel’s fifth child, Courtney, and Paul Michael Hill, who was one of the ‘Guildford Four’ falsely convicted of the 1974 IRA bombings of two pubs in Britain.
Police were called to the Kennedy compound at 2.30pm on Thursday and in recordings 911 dispatchers talked about a ‘possible OD (overdose)’. Miss Kennedy Hill was taken to hospital where she was pronounced dead. The Cape and Islands district attorney’s office said police responded to a home in Hyannis Port ‘for a reported unattended death’.
Miss Kennedy Hill attended Boston College where she was a communications student and vice president of the college Democrats. She was due to graduate next year.
In a 2016 article for The Deerfield Scroll, the school newspaper of the elite £51,000-a-year Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, Miss Kennedy Hill said that her depression took root in her middle school years and would be ‘with me for the rest of my life’.
‘Although I was mostly a happy child, I suffered bouts of deep sadness that felt like a heavy boulder on my chest,’ she wrote. ‘These bouts would come and go, but they did not outwardly affect me until I was a new sophomore at Deerfield.’ At that point she began ‘isolating’ herself in her room and ‘pulling away’ from friendships. Her school work suffered and during the winter her ‘sadness surrounded me constantly’.
Though it lifted in the summer, it returned. She wrote: ‘My sense of well-being was already compromised, and I totally lost it after someone I knew and loved broke serious sexual boundaries with me. I did the worst thing a victim can do, and I pretended it hadn’t happened. This all became too much, and I attempted to take my own life.’
Miss Kennedy Hill was proud of her Irish heritage and spent part of her childhood in Ireland – her name is Gaelic and means ‘freedom’.
Her father was jailed for 15 years before his conviction was overturned and he married her mother after his release in 1993.
The Hyannis Port compound has been home to multiple members of the Kennedy dynasty including JFK, who famously used it as a summer White House.
‘Our hearts are shattered’