BOSTON — A granddaughter of Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1968 whereas working for president, has died. Saoirse Kennedy Hill was 22.
The Kennedy household confirmed the demise in a press release Thursday night time after police responded to a name a couple of doable drug overdose on the storied Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. The assertion was issued by Brian Wright O’Connor, a spokesman for Saoirse Hill’s uncle, former congressman Joseph P. Kennedy II.
Hill was the daughter of Robert and Ethel Kennedy’s fifth little one, Courtney, and Paul Michael Hill, who was one in every of 4 folks falsely convicted within the 1974 Irish Republican Army bombings of two pubs. The two are actually divorced.
“She lit up our lives with her love, her peals of laughter and her generous spirit,” the assertion stated, including she was captivated with human rights and ladies’s empowerment and labored with indigenous communities to construct colleges in Mexico.
Hill, whose first identify is pronounced SIR-shuh, attended Boston College, the place she was a member of the category of 2020, the college confirmed to The Boston Globe.
The Cape & Islands district legal professional’s workplace stated Barnstable police responded to a house “for a reported unattended death” Thursday afternoon, in line with a press release cited by information retailers. Barnstable police and Massachusetts State Police detectives had been investigating.
In this June 6, 2000 file picture, Robert F. Kennedy’s granddaughter Saoirse Kennedy Hill locations a white rose on the Eternal Flame, President John F. Kennedy’s gravesite, at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Va. AP
The household assertion didn’t embrace a reason behind demise, however audio of a Barnstable police scanner name obtained by The Associated Press stated officers had been responding to a report of a drug overdose on the compound.
“The world is a little less beautiful today,” the Kennedy household assertion quoted Hill’s 91-year-old grandmother and RFK’s widow, Ethel Kennedy, as saying.
Hill had written frankly and publicly about her struggles with psychological well being and a suicide try whereas in highschool. “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 February 2016 column in The Deerfield Scroll, the coed newspaper at Deerfield Academy, the elite non-public college in Massachusetts she attended.
Hill wrote that she grew to become depressed two weeks earlier than her highschool junior yr began and he or she “totally lost it after someone I knew and loved broke serious sexual boundaries with me.” She wrote that she pretended it hadn’t occurred, and when it grew to become an excessive amount of, “I attempted to take my own life.”
She urged the varsity to be extra open about psychological sickness.
People stand contained in the Kennedy compound on Friday, Aug. 2, 2019, in Hyannis Port, Mass.AP
Hill additionally helped discovered a bunch on the college known as Deerfield Students Against Sexual Assault, in line with a November 2016 story within the paper, and he or she attended a March for Our Lives gun violence prevention rally in Barnstable in March 2018, The Barnstable Patriot newspaper reported on the time.
Robert F. Kennedy was gunned down in Los Angeles in 1968 after profitable California’s Democratic presidential major. He had served as legal professional basic within the administration of his brother, President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in Dallas in 1963. He additionally served as a U.S. senator from New York.
RFK’s household, like the remainder of the Kennedy clan, has been touched by tragedy.
One of his and Ethel Kennedy’s 11 kids, Michael Kennedy, was killed in a snowboarding accident in Colorado on New Year’s Eve 1997 at age 39. And in 1984, one other son, David Anthony Kennedy, died of a drug overdose in Florida at age 28.
JFK’s son, John F. Kennedy Jr., was killed along with his spouse and sister-in-law…