Biden told the crowd at the University of Iowa. It was an errant driver who stopped to drink instead of drive and hit a tractor-trailer, hit my children and my wife and killed them.Īnd in December 2007, while stumping for the Democratic presidential nomination in Iowa City, Biden said the following while answering a voter's question about negative campaigning: But, I say it here because it's so important for you to understand. I got a phone call saying, "Your wife's dead your daughter's dead." And I've only said that three times in public before. in a different circumstance, I got one of those phone calls. And, those of you who think it's presumptuous of me to say that. To the loved ones of the victims, there is nothing really we can say to erase this tragedy. During a speech he gave at the University of Delaware a week after the 9/11 terror attacks, for example, Biden said: It is true that at least twice, Biden has publicly stated or alleged that the driver tractor-trailer who hit his wife's station wagon had been drinking. Social media posts circulated during Joe Biden's 2020 presidential run declared that Biden had misrepresented the accident as being the fault of a drunken driver, and even that Biden had deliberately lied about it: For the ensuing 36 years of his Senate career, Biden famously commuted via Amtrak to Washington, D.C., from the family home in Wilmington, Delaware, daily in order to be home for his sons Beau and Hunter, who had been severely injured but survived the crash that killed their mother and sister.Īs in any such tragedy, one of the paramount questions is: what caused the fatal accident? Neilia Biden's station wagon was broadsided by a tractor-trailer truck at an intersection, but who - or what - was the underlying cause of the accident? Six weeks later, however, before he had assumed office, Biden's life took the most tragic of turns when his wife Neilia and their 1-year-old daughter, Naomi, were killed in an automobile accident. The seminal moment in the career of Joe Biden occurred in November 1972 when, as a 29-year-old lawyer whose only previous political experience was as a member of the New Castle County Council in Delaware, he pulled off an astounding upset victory over a Republican incumbent and won election to the U.S. I made it through, with a lot of support, and reconstructed my life and my family.No definitive evidence exists to prove or rule out whether the other driver had been drinking, and belief that drinking had contributed to the crash was reportedly prevalent among the local community and not something Biden simply made up on his own. In his 2017 book, Promise Me, Dad, he wrote: “The pain seemed unbearable in the beginning, and it took me a long time to heal, but I did survive the punishing ordeal. He went on to explain how he was in Washington hiring staff for his new Senate role when he found out his wife and daughter had died. What has Joe Biden said about her death?Īt a 2015 commencement speech Mr Biden told students at Yale University: “Six weeks after my election, my whole world was altered forever.” Mr Biden was sworn into the Senate in the hospital where they were recovering. Ms Hunter and the children were all taken to Wilmington General Hospital, but she and her daughter Naomi, who was just one year old, died upon arrival.īoth of the boys sustained serious injuries, but survived. She accidentally drove into the path of a tractor trailer, which struck the car. On 18 December 1972, a month after Mr Biden won the senate race, Ms Hunter was driving to collect a Christmas tree, along with their three children, in Hockessin, Delaware, near their home. Joe Biden married his second wife, Jill, in 1977 (Photo: AP) Neilia Hunter’s death
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