Fact Check: Did Joe Biden Lie About a Drunken Driver Killing His Wife and Daughter?

Joe Biden was a 29-year-old lawyer when he won the election to the U.S Senate in November 1972 against a Republican incumbent by a mere 3,162 votes. His previous political experience before he won the seat was as a member of the New Castle County Council in Delaware.

However, before Biden had assumed offices, in just six weeks, his life took the most tragic of turns when his wife Neilia and their 1-year-old daughter, Naomi, were killed in an automobile accident.

Biden's tragic past

For 36 years of his Senate career, Biden commuted through Amtrak to Washington, D.C., from the family home in Wilmington, Delaware, daily in order to be home for his sons Hunter and Beau, who had been severely injured but survived the crash that killed their mother and sister.

Just like in any tragedy, one of the main questions is what caused the fatal accident? Neilia Biden's station wagon was broadsided by a tractor-trailer truck at an intersection, but what was the underlying cause of the fatal accident?

During Joe Biden's 2020 presidential run, social media posts declared that Biden had misrepresented the accident as being the fault of a drunken driver, and even that Biden had deliberately lied about it.

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It is true that in two separate occasions, Biden has publicly stated or alleged that the driver tractor-trailer who hit his wife's station wagon had been drinking.

During a speech that he gave at the University of Delaware a week after the 9/11 terror attacks, he said he sympathized with the tragedy as he too lost his loved ones due to a drunk driving incident.

In December 2007, while stumping for the Democratic presidential nomination in Iowa City, Biden again told the story about how he lost his wife and child while answering a voter's question about negative campaigning, as reported by The New York Times.

The accident

The accident happened at the intersection of Limestone and Valley Road in Hockessin, Delaware. At the time, it was a remote, rural section of New Castle County.

According to the volunteer fireman who responded to the scene and attended the driver of the tractor-trailer, Limestone Road was a popular trucker shortcut in the Piedmont foothills leading from Delaware into Pennsylvania. He added that the intersection with Valley Road was very dangerous.

In a 2009 profile of Biden, Politico noted that the other driver was not charged with drunken driving or anything else that would indicate fault on his part.

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 car.

This raised eyebrows, as it may indicate that Biden lied when he implied that the driver had been drinking. According to Lou Angeli, the fireman at the scene, there was no evidence that establishes or disproves that point.

Angeli said that in regards to intoxication, the driver Curtis C. Dunn was not assessed, and there was no way to determine if he had been drinking at that time since neither of the police officers had breathalyzers on their cop cars.

Angeli asserted that this alleged aspect of the accident was not a lie Biden made up out of whole cloth, and that right or wrong, rumor or belief that drinking had contributed to the crash was prevalent among the community.

Either way, Biden had not talked about the incident in the last 13 years, and he has since apologized to Dunn's daughter, while his spokesman declared that Biden now fully accepts the Dunn family's word that the rumors were false.