In December 1972, Joe Biden‘s life was picture perfect.
At 30 years old, he had just been elected to represent Delaware in Congress, making him the second youngest senator in history.
He had a beautiful wife of six years, Neilia. They shared three healthy children – sons Beau, 4, Hunter, 3, and 13-month-old daughter Naomi.
In fact, their good fortune was so great that Biden’s young wife admitted it made her nervous.
Sitting by the fire in their Wilmington home writing Christmas cards together, she turned to him, filled with dread.
‘What’s going to happen, Joey?’ she asked. ‘Things are too good.’
TRAGEDY CAME KNOCKING
Days later, newly-elected Biden was working in Washington DC, interviewing prospective staff, when the phone rang.
‘They put a pretty young woman on the phone. She was so nervous,’ Biden recalled nearly 50 years later at a rally for his 2020 presidential campaign, ‘She said: “You gotta come home. There’s been an accident.”‘
At approximately 2.30 pm on Monday, December 18, Neilia had been driving along a suburban road with her three children on the way to pick up a Christmas tree in Hockessin, Delaware, when she crept through a stop sign directly into the path of a speeding tractor-trailer.
Her Chevrolet station wagon was struck side-on and hurled 150 feet into an embankment.
‘Biden For Senate’ campaign flyers that were still piled in the car’s trunk filled the air and were strewn all over the roadway, along with shards of glass and twisted debris.
BUT IT WAS TOO LATE
Neilia, also 30, and Naomi were rushed to Wilmington General Hospital, but it was too late.
They were declared dead on arrival.
Beau and Hunter were severely injured, but alive. Beau’s leg had been broken. Hunter’s skull had been fractured.
WHAT THEN HAPPENED?
In that instant, Biden became a widower and a single father with two boys under the age of five.
He fell into a state of deep grief and depression, later revealing he even contemplated suicide.
After her death, he considered resigning from public office to focus on raising his boys but Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield persuaded him not to.
READ ALSO – Frank Biden sparks FURY as he makes shocking statement about his brother’s decision to drop out of the race
JOE AS SENATOR
Two and a half weeks after the crash, a media circus descended on the hospital where Hunter and Beau were still being treated for their injuries.
Beau was wheeled into the small chapel attached to the hospital and Hunter was perched on the side of the bed as their father was officially sworn in as senator.
THE LIES HE TOLD ABOUT THE DRIVER
The driver of the truck that smashed into the Biden family car, Curtis Dunn, then 33, escaped unscathed and was absolved of all wrongdoing when police determined that Neilia had accidentally driven into his path.
Investigators also found that Dunn had attempted to avoid the collision with such force that he’d overturned his rig, before then rushing to help Neilia and the children.
But in the decades following, Biden has repeatedly and falsely implied that Dunn was at fault and had been drinking, describing him as ‘a guy who allegedly – and I never pursued it – drank his lunch instead of eating his lunch.’
In 2009, Dunn’s daughter Pamela Hamill was asked about Biden’s claims for a CBS News report.
NO APOLOGY
Her father had passed away in 1999, but Pamela said she had been so upset that she had asked Biden for an apology.
Later, she admitted he had, privately at least, been ‘very apologetic’, calling her personally. But, she said, he’d drawn the line at issuing a ‘public apology’, saying if he did it would ‘end up in all the trashy magazines in the grocery store.’
Hamill never took Biden up on an offer to meet with her family in person, and she never heard from him again.
