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Biden’s wife, Neilia, and 13-month-old daughter Naomi were killed in a Christmastime car crash in December 1972 shortly after Biden was elected to the U.S. Senate. The couple’s two sons, Beau and Hunter, who were then about to turn 4 and 3, were also in the car and were seriously injured.
Biden, 79, paid his respects Saturday at a cemetery on the grounds of St. Joseph on the Brandywine Roman Catholic church in Delaware, according to White House pool reporters who accompanied the presidential motorcade to the site.
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His sonBeau, who died of brain cancer in 2015 at 46, is also buried at the cemetery.
Looking Back at the Fatal Crash
In 1972, just one month after winning his first Senate race, Biden learned that his wife and college sweetheart, Neilia, and their daughter Naomi had been killed in a car wreck while they were out shopping for a Christmas tree.
“By the tone of the phone call, you just knew,” Biden said in 2012, addressing the families of fallen U.S. soldiers. “You just felt it in your bones: Something bad happened.”
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After the wreck, senator-elect Biden took the oath of office at the hospital to stay with his boys while they recuperated.
“I was supposed to be sworn in with everyone else that year in ‘73, but I wouldn’t go down. So … the secretary of the Senate [came] to swear me in, in the hospital room with my children,” he recalled in a Yale University commencement address in 2015.
Biden married Jill in 1977, and the couple had daughter Ashley in 1981.
source: people.com
