Saoirse Kennedy Hill, a granddaughter of Robert F. Kennedy, died on Thursday after suffering an apparent overdose at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Ma., the New York Times reports. Hill, 22, was the daughter of Courtney Kennedy Hill. She was at the compound, where her grandmother, Ethel Kennedy, lives, when emergency responders were called on Thursday afternoon. Ethel Kennedy, 91, Robert F. Kennedy’s widow, said, “The world is a little less beautiful today.”
The Cape and Islands District Attorney’s Office said, “The matter remains under investigation by the Barnstable police as well as state police detectives assigned to the Cape and Islands District Attorney’s Office.” Before enrolling in Boston College, where she was a communication major, Hill wrote in 2016 about her struggles with depression and mental illness for the student newspaper at Deerfield Academy, a private preparatory school in Massachusetts. Regarding her depression, she wrote, “[it] took root in the beginning of my middle school years and will be with me for the rest of my life.” She described “deep bouts of sadness that felt like a heavy boulder on my chest.”