RFK Granddaughter Found Dead in Apparent Suicide

Has the so-called “Kennedy Curse” found another victim?

The death of Robert F. Kennedy’s 22-year-old granddaughter is the latest heartbreak in a family beset by tragedies and untimely deaths from assassinations, accidents, and overdoses, that have caused many to speculate about a “Kennedy Curse.”

Saoirse Kennedy Hill, was staying at the family’s sprawling Cape Cod compound on Thursday when she died of an apparent drug overdose. She once wrote about her battle with depression and attempting to take her own life.

“The Kennedy Curse”

According the NY Post, the string of calamities linked to the “Curse” began when future President, John F. Kennedy’s oldest brother, Joe Kennedy Jr., died in 1944 when he volunteered to pilot a secret World War II bombing mission in France. Two in-flight explosions hit the aircraft, killing him and another pilot. He was 29 years old.

Only four years later, JFK’s sister Kathleen Kennedy died when a small plane crashed during a storm in France. She was only 28.

In 1963, President Kennedy and wife Jacqueline gave birth to their third child, Patrick, nearly six weeks early. He survived for less than two days. Later that year, the President, 46 years old, was assassinated in Dallas.

Saoirse’s grandfather, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, was shot dead in Los Angeles in 1968, just as he was gaining Democratic support for his own presidential run.

The next year, JFK and RFK’s brother, Sen. Edward “Ted” Kennedy — who died in 2009 at the age of 77 — wondered whether “some awful curse did actually hang over all the Kennedys.”

The list goes on and on…

JFK’s son, John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife, Carolyn Kennedy, and sister-in-law Lauren Bessette died in a plane crash in 1999. JFK Jr. was piloting the plane at night when he apparently lost his bearings — and the aircraft plummeted into the Atlantic.

Meanwhile, one of Robert F. Kennedy’s sons, David Kennedy, died in 1984, also of an apparent drug overdose in a Florida hotel. He was 28.

Another son of RFK, Michael Kennedy, died in a Colorado ski accident on New Year’s Eve 1997. He was 39.

And in 2011, Ted Kennedy’s daughter Kara Kennedy died at age 51 of a heart attack during a workout at a health club.

A curse? Bad luck, or just the tragedies that almost every family goes through?

“Certainly, those tragedies have equally affected other families, but [the Kennedys] are the people who are in the public eye,” Melody Masi, a Massachusetts psychotherapist, once told the Cape Cod Times. “Other people are not as well-known.”

Saoirse was the vice president of the College Democrats at Boston College where she was a student. Her family says she was “passionately moved by the causes of human rights and women’s empowerment and found great joy in volunteer work.”

The Kennedy family said in a statement, their “hearts are shattered by the loss of our beloved Saoirse” and said “her life was filled with hope, promise and love.” They added, “we will love her and miss her forever.”