RFK granddaughter dies at 22 in possible overdose
BOSTON — Authorities say they are looking to toxicology reports for clues to the death of Saoirse Kennedy Hill, 22, a granddaughter of assassinated presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy.
The family confirmed the death in a statement Thursday night after police responded to a call about a possible drug overdose at the storied Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port. The statement was issued by Brian Wright O’Connor, spokesman for Saoirse Hill’s uncle, former congressman Joseph Kennedy II.
Hill was the daughter of Robert and Ethel Kennedy’s fifth child, Courtney, and Paul Michael Hill, who was one of four people falsely convicted in the 1974 Irish Republican Army bombings of two pubs. The two are now divorced.
“She lit up our lives with her love, her peals of laughter and her generous spirit,” the statement said, adding she was passionate about human rights and women’s empowerment and worked with indigenous communities to build schools in Mexico.
Hill, whose first name is pronounced SIRshuh, attended Boston College, where she was a member of the class of 2020.
The Cape & Islands district attorney’s office said Barnstable police responded to a home “for a reported unattended death” Thursday afternoon, according to a statement cited by news outlets. Barnstable police and Massachusetts State Police detectives were investigating.
The family statement did not include a cause of death, but audio of a Barnstable police scanner call said officers were responding to a report of a drug overdose at the compound.
“The world is a little less beautiful today,” the Kennedy family statement quoted Hill’s 91yearold grandmother and RFK’s widow, Ethel Kennedy, as saying.
Hill had written publicly about her struggles with mental health and a suicide attempt while in high school.
“My depression took root in the beginning of my middle school years and will be with me for the rest of my life,” she wrote in a 2016 column in the Deerfield Scroll, the student newspaper at Deerfield Academy, the elite private school in Massachusetts she attended.