For one family, though, the famed Biden reputation for empathy comes up short.
Curtis Dunn was the driver whose truck struck Neilia’s car. By all accounts, Dunn was absolved of wrongdoing in the accident, with no evidence that speeding or alcohol was a factor. Dunn, who died in 1999, never forgot that awful day, wondering aloud in future years “how the little Biden boys are doing,” recalls his daughter, 54-year-old Pamela Hamill of Newark, Delaware.
But decades later, Biden on at least two occasions, in 2001 and 2007, offered an inaccurate version of Dunn’s role in the accident, referring publicly to a truck driver who “stopped to drink” before driving and describing the driver as “a guy who allegedly — and I never pursued it — drank his lunch instead of eating his lunch.”
Hamill, dismayed by the misrepresentations, crusaded to correct the record, and got some media attention for her efforts.
Biden later called her – at first agitated about the impact the controversy was having on his own mother, who he said “had to go on anxiety medication,” in Hamill’s recounting. Further, Biden told her it was his own son, Beau, who had had to retrieve the accident report.
“Then he was very apologetic,” Hamill continued. “By this time I was in tears. He said, ‘I’m sorry, don’t cry. I will come to your home with all your family there and apologize.’” But Biden told her he would not issue a public apology, telling Hamill that it would “end up in all the trashy magazines in the grocery store.”
Hamill never took him up on the offer to meet with her family, worried about how her mother would handle it. She never heard from him again.
Wow.