1972 Crash Still Haunts Driver's Family | Delawareonline | the News Journal

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No DUI in crash that killed Biden's 1st wife, but he's implied otherwise

By RACHEL KIPP • The News Journal • September 4, 2008

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Since his vice presidential nomination, Joe Biden's 2007 statement that a "guy who allegedly ... drank his lunch" and drove the truck that struck and killed his first wife and daughter has gained national media traction.

Alcohol didn't play a role in the 1972 crash, investigators found. But as recently as last week, the syndicated TV show Inside Edition aired a clip from 2001 of Biden describing the accident to an audience at the University of Delaware and saying the truck driver "stopped to drink instead of drive."

The senator's statements don't jibe with news and law enforcement reports from the time, Comments Joe Biden made in 2007 and 2001 which cleared driver Curtis C. Dunn, who died in 1999, of wrongdoing. about his first wife's death don't jibe with law enforcement reports. "To see it coming from [Biden's] mouth, I just burst into tears," Dunn's daughter, Glasgow resident Pamela Hamill, 44, said Wednesday. "My dad was always there for us. Now we feel like we should be there for him because he's not here to defend himself."

Biden spokesman David Wade said Wednesday that the senator "fully accepts the Dunn family's word that these rumors were false."

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It's unclear who first suggested alcohol was a factor in the crash, but since Barack Obama tapped Biden to be his running mate on Aug. 23, The New York Times, National Public Radio and The Economist have run stories that characterized Dunn as a drunken driver.

"The rumor about alcohol being involved by either party, especially the truck driver, is incorrect," said Jerome O. Herlihy, a Delaware Superior Court judge who was chief deputy attorney general and worked with crash investigators in 1972.

"If it were some part of a cause of the accident, there would have been a charge, simply because if you're driving under the influence and kill someone in the process -- whether it's the wife of a U.S. senator or anybody else -- there's going to be a charge," he said.

Herlihy said investigators discussed several possible causes for the crash, including that The News Journal/RON SOLIMAN Biden's first wife, Neilia, turned her head and didn't see the oncoming truck as she exited the intersection of Limestone and Valley roads on Dec. 18, 1972. Pamela Hamill holds a photo of her father, Curtis C. Dunn, and a letter from Sen. Joe Biden that Neither Biden's book nor his campaign Web site directly addresses the alcohol issue, but says neither he nor his family "feel any animosity the senator has done so publicly on at least two occasions. whatsoever." (Buy photo) The New York Times reported the 2007 crowd at the University of Iowa grew silent as Biden gave his version of what happened that day.

"Let me tell you a little story," The newspaper quoted Biden as saying. "I got elected when I was 29, and I got elected November the 7th. And on Dec. 18 of that year, my wife and three kids were Christmas shopping for a Christmas tree. 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."

Biden told a similar story when addressing an audience at the Bob Carpenter Center at the University of Delaware a few days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

"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," Biden said, according to a transcript archived on his Senate Web site. The Evening Journal, Dec. 21, 1972 Even before Obama asked Biden to join his campaign, political observers said the senator's gaffes could be a liability in a contest where every word will be scrutinized. Biden's first STATEMENT FROM THE DUNN FAMILY, AS PREPARED BY PAMELA HAMILL presidential campaign 20 years ago was undone by charges he plagiarized parts of a speech by British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock. "I agreed to give a statement today representing Asked about Biden's accounts of the accident, Wade warned against writing anything that my family on behalf of our father Curtis Dunn, would "infer, paraphrase, or be anything less than precise on such a personal and tragic who died on Feb. 1, 1999. We wanted to subject." acknowledge that his unfortunate involvement in the fatal accident involving the deaths of Sen. After the 1972 accident, Biden never sought any records from the time of the crash, nor did Biden's first wife Neilia Biden and baby daughter he seek any further investigation, Wade said. Amy was in no way a result of any negligence of our father. "In remarks he made at the University of Iowa he said 'allegedly -- and I never pursued it.' " Wade wrote in an e-mail. "Nor did he encourage reporting on it then or at any other time. It was a tragic accident. Our father was not at He has never called it or thought of it as anything other than an 'accident.' His focus was fault and was never charged with any wrongdoing his grief over the loss of his wife and daughter and his concern for the recovery of his whatsoever. This story has been in the media sons." many, many times most recently because of Sen. Biden's bid for vice president. Sen. Barack News reports from 1972 said Neilia Hunter Biden pulled away from a stop sign at Obama made a statement recently that this tragic Limestone and Valley roads about 2:30 p.m. when the tractor-trailer driven by Dunn, which event had changed the trajectory of Sen. Biden's was coming down a hill on Limestone Road, hit the side of her station wagon. Dunn freed life. It also changed our father's. We're not trying himself from the truck and was the first to reach the Biden car, according to a report by the to equate Sen. Biden's loss to my father's The Evening Journal, a precursor to The News Journal. heartache. But we wanted it to be known that our father never forgot that tragic day. Neilia Biden and 13-month-old daughter Naomi, whom the family called Amy, were declared dead at a hospital. Son Beau, now Delaware's attorney general, broke his leg, and The accident happened on Dec. 18, 1972, one son Hunter suffered head injuries. Joe Biden, who had been elected to his first term in the week before Christmas. I was just 8 years old. I Senate just a month before, took his oath of office at the boys' bedside. always wondered why our father was so solemn around the holidays. My mother explained to us Two days after the crash, Herlihy, a neighbor of the Bidens in the late 1960s who still

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that it was the anniversary of the tragic event. My father would often say 'I wonder how the little Biden boys are doing,' as they were injured in that accident.

After the Sept. 11 tragedy, Sen. Biden stated in the local newspaper, The News Journal, that he knew just how the families of the victims felt and considers the senator "a friend," told the paper that there was no evidence that Dunn "was he went on to explain the loss of his wife and speeding, drinking or driving a truck with faulty brakes." No criminal charges related to the daughter. That compelled me to write to Sen. crash were ever filed against Dunn, who lived in North East, Md. Biden on behalf of our father, explaining the Hamill, one of seven children, was 8 years old at the time of the accident. She remembers effect it had on him, as well as our family. her father watching news reports of the crash while wearing a sling to support a shoulder Sen. Biden responded with this note: 'Dear Ms. injury he suffered in the accident. Dunn, I apologize for taking so long to She said Dunn was always "solemn" around the Christmas holidays. Years later, when her acknowledge your thoughtful and heartfelt note. brother planned to get married on Dec. 18, Dunn told the family "I don't celebrate on that All that I can say is I am sorry for all of us and day," Hamill said. please know that neither I nor my sons feel any animosity whatsoever. Warm regards, Sen. "We're not trying to equate Sen. Biden's loss to my father's heartache," Hamill said. "But Biden.' " we wanted it to be known that our father never forgot that tragic day." Related articles Hamill said it wasn't until the Inside Edition report that she became aware that the Delaware senator had said alcohol played a role in the accident. Dunn did not consume any Biden spokesman responds to this story alcohol the day of the crash, Hamill said. Biden repeats pledge of tax cut for 95%

She said she immediately called Biden's office after being contacted by Inside Edition and On the Web is waiting for the senator's response. John McCain's campaign site "The family feels these statements are both hurtful and untrue and we didn't know where Barack Obama's campaign site they originated from," Hamill said.

As Hamill watched a recording of the Inside Edition report Wednesday, she gasped when the clip of Biden's comments from Iowa came on screen. Related news from the Web

After reading a News Journal account of Biden's 2001 speech at UD, Hamill sent Biden a US Politics letter on behalf of her father. The newspaper story included Biden's description of getting Life the call that his wife and daughter had died, but not his comments about Dunn. Holidays Christmas Hamill said her note to the senator described how Dunn was affected by the accident. Family Printed on the senator's letter head and dated Oct. 11, 2001, the response from Biden reads: US News Barack Obama "I apologize for taking so long to acknowledge your thoughtful and heartfelt note," Biden Kids wrote. "All that I can say is I am sorry for all of us and please know that neither I nor my Joe Biden sons feel any animosity whatsoever." University of Delaware Powered by Topix.net Contact Rachel Kipp at 324-2386 or [email protected].

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4 of 4 10/16/2012 3:44 PM Biden Campaigning With Ease After Hardships - New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/14/us/politics/14biden.html?_r=0&pa...

December 14, 2007

THE LONG RUN Biden Campaigning With Ease After Hardships

By ELISABETH BUMILLER

IOWA CITY — Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware , a back-in-the-pack Democratic candidate for president, was answering a voter’s question last week about negative campaigning when he abruptly began talking about his first, euphoric run for the Senate, in 1972, and the personal tragedy that nearly destroyed his life afterward.

“Let me tell you a little story,” Mr. Biden told the crowd at the University of Iowa . “I got elected when I was 29, and I got elected November the 7th. And on Dec. 18 of that year, my wife and three kids were Christmas shopping for a Christmas tree. 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.”

The crowd was silent as Mr. Biden continued. His wife, Neilia, and 13-month-old daughter, Naomi, were gone, but his sons, not quite 3 and 4 years old at the time, made full recoveries. “They’re both, thank God, healthy and well,” Mr. Biden told the crowd.

One of them, Beau, 38, is now the attorney general of Delaware and a captain in an Army National Guard unit headed for Iraq. The other, Hunter, 37, is a lawyer in Washington. Both spend weekends in Iowa on their father’s campaign. Mr. Biden’s second wife, Jill, whom he married five years after the accident, is working on the race as well, as is their 25-year-old daughter, Ashley.

Mr. Biden has rebuilt his life, but the long-ago accident has become part of the narrative of his campaign and the most horrific of three major crises — including life-threatening cranial aneurysms in 1988 and the blowup in 1987 of his first presidential race over accusations of plagiarism — that have created the liberated 65-year-old candidate of today.

Mr. Biden has survived so much personal and political catastrophe that not much about this race — not his distant standing in the polls nor his own missteps — seems to get him down. It is the last, great ride of his White House ambitions, and this time, unlike 20 years ago, he seems determined to make it right.

“This has been the easiest campaign I’ve ever run in,” Mr. Biden said cheerfully in an interview in a van at the Iowa City Airport, where he was about to board a four-seat airplane and head off into the icy December blackness for an event at Grinnell College. “I haven’t had to game anything. For real. I know what I believe, I know what I want to do, and I’m just comfortable saying it, and laying it out there.”

Some would say that Mr. Biden, the extraordinarily talkative chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations

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Committee, is far too comfortable saying whatever pops into his head. When he announced in January that he was running for president, Mr. Biden’s big day was overshadowed by his hapless description of another Democratic presidential candidate, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, as “the first mainstream African- American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”

Six months earlier in New Hampshire, Mr. Biden said that “you cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.”

As a candidate, Mr. Biden is just as often bracingly direct. “The American people don’t give a darn about any of this stuff that’s going on up here,” he said in the Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas last month as Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York brawled with her competitors and then accused them of slinging mud at her.

At a debate in October in Philadelphia, Mr. Biden dispensed with the Republican presidential candidate, Rudolph W. Giuliani , by cracking that “there’s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11.”

Despite his fondness for verbiage, Mr. Biden has only recently begun talking publicly about the accident that killed his wife and daughter. For decades he refused.

“The thing I hated, I was this tragic young figure,” he said in a follow-up phone conversation from Iowa last weekend. As the years passed, the tragedy receded in people’s memories, only to resurface when Mr. Biden, at a publisher’s insistence, included the story of the accident in a campaign autobiography, “Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics” (Random House), which was released last summer.

Mr. Biden said the accident became the first question from a new generation of reporters unaware of his past. This time he found he could talk about it, while still avoiding the painful details, as a way of connecting to people.

“Someone will stand up and say, ‘Well, I’ve lost this and I’ve lost that, and you guys don’t understand,’” Mr. Biden said. “And I say: ‘Look, I was a single parent for five years, and I understand what it’s like. I don’t understand your situation, but I’m not devoid of an understanding of the problems ordinary people face.’”

Joe Biden first met Neilia Hunter poolside in the Bahamas during spring break his junior year at the University of Delaware . He was one of four children in a middle-class, Irish-Catholic family who grew up in Scranton, Pa., and Wilmington, Del., and who had overcome an embarrassing stutter as a child; she was from a more affluent family in the Finger Lakes resort town of Skaneateles, N.Y.

They were married two years later, in 1966. Mr. Biden went on to become, in his words, an “arrogant and sloppy” student at the Syracuse University College of Law. He briefly practiced law in Delaware, was elected to the New Castle County Council and stunned everyone, including himself, when he won the Senate race against a popular incumbent. He was in Washington interviewing staff members for his new office when he got a call that there had been an accident back home.

Mr. Biden left his sons’ hospital room only for the memorial service. “I began to understand how despair led people to cash it in; how suicide wasn’t just an option but a rational option,” he wrote. He was sworn in at

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their bedside and arrived in Washington a hollow man, with no appetite for the Senate. Staff members from other offices, he later learned, were taking bets on how long he would last in the job.

To spend time with his sons, he made a daily commute on Amtrak from his home in Wilmington to Washington, 80 minutes one way, a habit he continues to this day. In 1977, he married a Delaware teacher, Jill Jacobs, and by 1987, his life and career back in order, he announced he was running for president.

But in a debate at the Iowa State Fair that summer, at a time when Mr. Biden was seen as a Kennedy-esque hope in a desultory Democratic pack, he lifted large portions without attribution from an address by the British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock. A top aide in the rival presidential campaign of Michael S. Dukakis circulated a video showing the similarities, and although Mr. Biden had credited Mr. Kinnock in earlier appearances, his failure to do so at the fair — he called it an oversight — created a media storm.

The furor began just as Mr. Biden, then the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was about to preside over the explosive hearings of President Ronald Reagan ’s choice for the Supreme Court , the conservative jurist Robert H. Bork .

Mr. Biden was opposed to Judge Bork and was determined to defeat him, although he was overcome with anxiety — and pounding headaches — as he faced the pressures of the hearings and his unraveling campaign. In late September, he gave up his bid for the White House.

“Aside from health, it was the most difficult decision I ever made, to get out of the race,” Mr. Biden said. He saw his choice as trying to save his candidacy or fulfilling what he saw as his responsibility to keep Judge Bork off the court. “I didn’t want it to be ‘Biden selfishly decides he’s going to save his own skin.’”

In October, the Senate rejected Judge Bork. Four months later, Mr. Biden collapsed in a hotel room in Rochester and was soon on an operating table in Washington undergoing surgery to remove an aneurysm. One risk was loss of speech. “I kind of wish that had happened last summer,” Mr. Biden said he told the surgeon.

Mr. Biden pulled through the operation and then another for a second aneurysm that May. He returned to the Senate in September 1988 and spent the next 19 years honing his expertise on foreign policy. As chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Biden now offers himself to voters as the candidate who will need no on-the-job training.

“I’ve forgotten more about these issues than most of these guys who are running know,” Mr. Biden told the crowd at the University of Iowa. Still, he insisted that he was not running for secretary of state, even though he said that Senator John Kerry , the Democratic nominee in 2004, told him at the time that he would offer him the job if he became president.

Looking back, Mr. Biden said he had learned something different from each of the three crises in his life. The accident taught him, he said, “to always let the people you love know you love them, and never let something go unsaid.” The aneurysm taught him that “it’s a hell of a lot easier being on the operating table than in the waiting room.” As for the 1987 race, Mr. Biden said he learned that he could pull himself back up after the crippling experience of having his character questioned, “particularly when it’s your own fault.”

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These days, life looks good. “I wouldn’t trade places with anybody right now, in or out of the race,” Mr. Biden said. A short time later, he tempered his enthusiasm. “I’m almost superstitious saying this,” he said. “Everything could change tomorrow.”

Elisabeth Bumiller reported from Iowa City and Des Moines last week and added updated information from Washington. Shawn Gude contributed reporting from Iowa City.

4 of 4 10/16/2012 3:59 PM Print

The Biden Family Car Crash: The Driver's Family Speaks Out

ORIGINAL AIRDATE: 9/17/2008

Pam Hamill wants America to know that her father was not responsible for the death Senator Joe Biden's wife and infant daughter in 1972. "[My dad] raised seven children, he was married to my mother for 53 years before he passed, and wasn't a drunk driver."

Hamill's father, Curtis Dunn, was the driver of the tractor trailer that crashed into the Biden family's car on December 18th, 1972 in the town of Hockessin, Delaware. Neilia Biden was driving her station wagon with her three young children after picking up a family Christmas tree.

According to a police investigation, Mrs. Biden pulled out into the intersection and didn't see Curtis Dunn's tractor trailer coming down the highway.

Pam Hamill spoke with INSIDE EDITION about how the car His daughter Pam tells INSIDE EDITION's Paul Boyd, "He said, 'She never saw me coming. She drifted into the intersection.' He said he did crash that killed Senator Joe everything he could. He said he jerked the wheel, flipping his tractor trailer on its side." Biden's first wife and daughter affected her father, Curtis Dunn. Neilia and Naomi Biden, the couple's 13-month-old daughter, were killed, and Biden's two sons were injured. Curtis Dunn was cleared of any wrongdoing in the accident, but the tragedy would haunt him for the rest of his life, until his own death in 1999.

"He couldn't celebrate Christmas anymore," Hamill tells INSIDE EDITION. "He couldn't enjoy the holidays. Even though he was not at fault, he was part of that accident."

Just as the Biden family suffered grievously, Pam Hamill wants everyone to know that her family has suffered too. She's heartbroken about public comments made by the Democratic Vice Presidential nominee saying that his late wife and daughter were the victims of a drunk driver. Though cleared of any wrongdoing in the accident, the Last month INSIDE EDITION reported that in December 2007, Biden opened up to a group of University of Iowa students, saying, "Let me tell you a tragedy would haunt Curtis little story. My wife and three kids were Christmas shopping for a Christmas tree, a tractor trailer, a guy who allegedly, and I never pursued it, drank Dunn for the rest of his life. his lunch instead of eating his lunch, broadsided my family, killed my wife instantly, killed my daughter instantly, and hospitalized my two sons."

INSIDE EDITION also found that in a 2001 speech archived on Biden's own website, he told students at the University of Delaware, "I got one of those phone calls...I got a phone call saying, 'Your wife's dead; your daughter's dead' ... 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."

INSIDE EDITION spoke with Jerome Herlihy, who was a Deputy Delaware Attorney General at the time of the accident. He was called in to oversee the police investigation, which found Curtis Dunn was not at fault.

Hamill says she reached out to "There was no evidence at the time that was presented to me that the driver of the truck was impaired by alcohol," Herlihy says. Senator Biden once, seven years ago, to let him know that Yet, the false story accusing Dunn of drunk driving is now widely accepted as the truth and was discussed on television news programs as recently her father also grieved for the as last month during the Democratic National Convention. loss of life in '72.

Pam Hamill says her family was unaware that Senator Biden had made comments calling her father a drunk driver until they saw the INSIDE EDITION story in August.

Hamill talked of her first reaction to hearing the news. "I just burst into tears and I looked at my husband, 'I just gotta say something. I gotta address this. I gotta clear my father's name. This is not true.'"

Hamill says she did reach out to Joe Biden once before, seven years ago, to tell the Senator her father had been tormented by the accident. "I felt Senator Biden responded with compelled to write to him and tell him my dad never forgot that, he hung onto that, he grieved over that for years." a short handwritten note on U.S. Senate stationary. Biden sent back a handwritten letter on U.S. Senate stationary in which he thanked her for her "thoughtful and heartfelt note." He went on to write, "All that I can say is that I am sorry for all of us and please know that neither I nor my sons feel any animosity whatsoever."

Hamill says she and her family have been reluctant to speak out in public until now. "We have always, always been very private about this, very respectful to the fact that he had loss of life. Losing your wife and daughter, that's tragic, that's absolutely. But drunk driver never happened, and we need him to acknowledge that."

In a statement to INSIDE EDITION in August, Biden's spokesman said: "His focus has always been on the tragedy of losing his wife and daughter, not on the circumstances that led to the crash. Dredging up the details of the accident now serves no purpose."

Hamill says she's fearful that with Biden now in the national spotlight, the fiction that her father was driving drunk will forever be remembered as fact. "I don't want it to be in history books or how about some time they make a movie and they portray my father as a drunk driver. We have to defend his honor; he's not here to do it. Who could fault us for that?"

Senator Biden's spokesman also acknowledged that Biden understands that the accident is painful for everyone involved.