A granddaughter of Robert F. Kennedy has died of an apparent overdose at the family’s compound in Massachusetts, according to friends of the family.
The death of Saoirse Kennedy Hill, 22, is the latest in a catalogue of tragedies that have hit the Kennedys, reports the BBC.
How did Saoirse Kennedy Hill die?
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According to two people close to the family, emergency services were called to the compound in Hyannis Port, the home of R.F.K’s 91-year-old widow, Ethel, on Thursday, reports The New York Times.
The young woman - daughter of Robert and Ethel Kennedy’s fifth child, Courtney - was taken to Cape Cod Hospital, where she was pronounced dead. The authorities subsequently issued a statement confirming a death at the property, but did not disclose the identity of the victim or the cause of death.
“The matter remains under investigation by the Barnstable police as well as state police detectives assigned to the Cape and Islands District Attorney’s Office,” said Tara Miltimore of the Cape and Islands District Attorney’s Office.
What is the ‘Kennedy curse’?
Several members of the family have died young, fuelling claims of a so-called Kennedy curse.
Most famously, President John F. Kennedy and Senator Robert F. Kennedy were both murdered by assassins. Their brother, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr, was killed in an air disaster during the Second World War, and their sister Kathleen Cavendish perished in a plane crash in 1948, at the age of 28.
And this is just the start of the litany of tragedies that have hit the family. John F. Kennedy Jr, the president’s son, was killed in 1999 when the airplane he was flying crashed into the Atlantic Ocean.
Another family member, Edward Kennedy, drove off a bridge on a small island next to Martha’s Vineyard in 1969.
R.F.K’s son David was found dead in 1984 at the age of 28 in a hotel in Palm Beach, Florida. He had suffered from alcohol and drug addiction after watching his father’s assassination on live television as a boy, according to reports.
President Kennedy and first lady Jacqueline Kennedy had also lost a son, Patrick, who died just two days after he was born nearly six weeks early in 1963. He struggled to breathe, due to a lung condition.
In his book, The Kennedy Curse: Shattered, author Les Williams points the finger of blame for many of the tragedies at Joe Kennedy, the late father of J.F.K. and his siblings, reports the Daily Express.
Williams writes: “Joe Kennedy raised his children to believe that they were better than anyone else and that they had to win, every time and at any cost.”
This “obsessive, driving ambition would influence the decisions his children made and the way they lived their lives, and this controlling, overbearing approach would have disastrous consequences for the family over the years”, he argues.
What do the family say about the ‘curse’?
The curse claims have been rejected by Edward Kennedy Jr, who lost a leg to bone cancer, and his brother Patrick. The two men are the sons of J.F.K.’s brother Ted, who died from cancer at the age of 77 in 2009.
“No. No. Obviously, my dad had a sense of spirituality that transcended his ability to face these problems, you know, in a way that would have otherwise paralysed the normal person,” Patrick told CNN in 2009.
Edward Jr added: “The Kennedy family has had to endure these things in a very open way. But our family is just like... every other family in America in many ways.”
However, Patrick has opened up about his family struggle with mental health issues. In 2015, he published a memoir, A Common Struggle: a Personal Journey Through the Past and Future of Mental Illness and Addiction, that “created a rift with family members upset over his portrayal of family secrecy, substance abuse and mental illness”, according to The Guardian.
His father was also heard on at least one occasion wondering aloud whether the family were victims of an “awful curse”, reports The Washington Post.
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