Reuters contributed to this report.
HYANNIS PORT, Mass. — Robert F. Kennedy’s granddaughter, Saoirse Kennedy Hill, has died, the family announced Thursday night.
The Kennedy family’s statement followed reports of a death at the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. The statement was issued by Brian Wright O’Connor, a spokesman for Saoirse Hill’s uncle, former congressman Joseph P. Kennedy II.
Hill was the daughter of Robert and Ethel Kennedy’s fifth child, Courtney, and Paul Michael Hill, who was one of four falsely convicted in the 1974 Irish Republican Army bombings of two pubs.
“She lit up our lives with her love, her peals of laughter and her generous spirit,” the statement said, adding that she was passionate about human rights and women’s empowerment and worked with indigenous communities to build schools in Mexico.
Emergency responders were called to the Hyannis Port estate Thursday afternoon and Hill was rushed to Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis, where she was pronounced dead, The New York Times reported.
Hill was a student at Boston College class of 2020, where she was a communication major and vice president of the Student Democrats, according to the Times.
The paper said she had written about struggling with mental illness while a student at a private school in Massachusetts in 2016.
The family statement did not include a cause of death. The Times reported that it was an apparent overdose
The Cape & Islands district attorney’s office said Barnstable police responded to a home “for a reported unattended death”’ Thursday afternoon, according to a statement cited by news outlets. Barnstable police and Massachusetts State Police detectives assigned to the district attorney’s office are investigating.
“The world is a little less beautiful today,” Hill’s 91-year-old grandmother, Ethel Kennedy, was quoted as saying in the statement.
