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The seminal moment in the career of Joe Biden occurred in November 1972 when, as a 29-year-old lawyer whose only previous political experience was as a member of the New Castle County Council in Delaware, he pulled off an astounding upset victory over a Republican incumbent and won election to the U.S. Senate by a mere 3,162 votes. Six weeks later, however, before he had assumed office, Biden's life took the most tragic of turns when his wife Neilia and their 1-year-old daughter, Naomi, were killed in an automobile accident. For the ensuing 36 years of his Senate career, Biden famously commuted via Amtrak to Washington, D.C., from the family home in Wilmington, Delaware, daily in order to be home for his sons Beau and Hunter, who had been severely injured but survived the crash that killed their mother and sister. As in any such tragedy, one of the paramount questions is: what caused the fatal accident? Neilia Biden's station wagon was broadsided by a tractor-trailer truck at an intersection, but who — or what — was the underlying cause of the accident? Social media posts circulated during Joe Biden's 2020 presidential run declared that Biden had misrepresented the accident as being the fault of a drunken driver, and even that Biden had deliberately lied about it: It is true that at least twice, Biden has publicly stated or alleged that the driver tractor-trailer who hit his wife's station wagon had been drinking. During a speech he gave at the University of Delaware a week after the 9/11 terror attacks, for example, Biden said: And in December 2007, while stumping for the Democratic presidential nomination in Iowa City, Biden said the following while answering a voter's question about negative campaigning: The accident took place at the intersection of Limestone and Valley Road in Hockessin, Delaware. At the time, it was a remote, rural section of New Castle County, described as follows by a probationary volunteer fireman who responded to the scene and attended the driver of the tractor-trailer: But as Politico noted in a 2009 profile of Biden, 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 vehicle: Does this mean Biden was untruthful — even lying, perhaps — when he implied that Dunn had been drinking? According to Lou Angeli, the fireman referenced above who treated Dunn at the scene, observed, no evidence definitively establishes or disproves that point: Angeli asserted that this alleged aspect of the accident wasn't a lie Biden simply made up out of whole cloth, and that right or wrong, rumor and belief that drinking had contributed to the crash was prevalent among the local community: Either way, we didn't turn up any instances of Biden's having publicly raised the issue in the last 13 years, and Biden has since apologized to Dunn's daughter, while his spokesman declared that Biden now fully accepts the Dunn family's word that these rumors were false:
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