TEDDY KENNEDY KILLS
MARY JO KOPECHNE IN CAR ACCIDENT
LEAVING HER TO SUFFOCATE
On this day in 1969, Mary Jo Kopechne attended a party on Chappaquiddick Island, off the east coast of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. The celebration was in honor of the dedicated work of the Boiler Room Girls, and was the fourth such reunion of the Robert F. Kennedy campaign workers. Ted Kennedy attended for his late brother.
Kopechne reportedly left the party at 11:15 p.m. with Ted. According to his own account, he offered to drive her to catch the last ferry back to Edgartown, where she was staying. She did not tell her close friends at the party that she was leaving, and she left her purse and keys behind. Kennedy drove the 1967 Oldsmobile Delmont 88 off a narrow, unlit bridge, which was without guardrails and was not on the route to Edgartown.
The Oldsmobile landed in Poucha Pond and overturned in the water; Kennedy extricated himself from the vehicle and survived, but Kopechne did not and died in the submerged vehicle eight days shy of her twenty-ninth birthday.
Kennedy failed to report the incident to the authorities until the car and Kopechne's body were discovered the next morning. . .
The captain of the local fire department testified at the inquest:
It looked as if she were holding herself up to get a last breath of air. It was a consciously assumed position.... She didn't drown. She died of suffocation in her own air void. It took her at least three or four hours to die. I could have had her out of that car twenty-five minutes after I got the call. But he [Ted Kennedy] didn't call. . .
Farrar testified later at the inquest that Kopechne's body was pressed up in the car in the spot where an air bubble would have formed. He interpreted that to mean that Kopechne had survived in the air bubble after the crash, and he concluded that:
Had I received a call within five to ten minutes of the accident occurring, and was able, as I was the following morning, to be at the victim's side within twenty-five minutes of receiving the call, in such event there is a strong possibility that she would have been alive on removal from the submerged car.
Farrar believed that Kopechne "lived for at least two hours down there."
A week after the incident, Kennedy pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident after causing injury. He received a two-month suspended sentence. . . .
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