He's a retired judge who then was a deputy attorney general and once was a neighbor to Biden and remains friendly. The truck driver did not," Jerome Herlihy told me. For whatever reason, Neilia Biden, who was holding the baby, ended up in the right of way of Dunn's truck coming down a long hill. The accident was an accident, and though the police file no longer exists, coverage in the newspapers at the time made it clear that fault was not in question. Dunn of Pennsylvania, was not charged with drunk driving. Based on evidence and witness accounts, it appeared that Neilia Biden had pulled into the truck driver's right of way at an intersection with a two-way stop, and the tractor-trailer driver was unable to stop in time to avoid striking her vehicle: skid marks.īut as Politico noted in a 2009 profile of Biden, the other driver was not charged with drunken driving, or anything else that would indicate fault on his part. Whether Curtis Dunn was speeding is unknown, but he had applied his brakes, which was apparent from twin 150 ft. The speed limit on Limestone Road, at the intersection, was 35mph and huge REDUCE SPEED signs were posted a half-mile in both directions. Truckers traveling in either direction used the momentum coming down one hill, in order to climb the other. The intersection with Valley Road was extremely dangerous, located at the bottom of two steep hills. Limestone Road was a popular trucker shortcut in the Piedmont foothills leading from Delaware into Pennsylvania. At the time, it was a remote, rural section of New Castle County, described as follows by a probationary volunteer fireman who responded to the scene and attended the driver of the tractor-trailer: The accident took place at the intersection of Limestone and Valley Road in Hockessin, Delaware. A tractor-trailer, a guy who allegedly - and I never pursued it - drank his lunch instead of eating his lunch, broadsided my family and killed my wife instantly, and killed my daughter instantly, and hospitalized my two sons, with what were thought to be at the time permanent, fundamental injuries." 18 of that year, my wife and three kids were Christmas shopping for a Christmas tree. "I got elected when I was 29, and I got elected November the 7th. 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. 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.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |