It’s tucked away in a hidden corner of the Brack-Ex-Roselle neighborhood near Elsmere. 18, 2021, the anniversary of Neilia and Naomi Biden's death.įive years after her death, the Neilia Hunter Biden park was dedicated in her honor. Joseph on the Brandywine Catholic Church in Wilmington, Del., on Saturday, Dec. Is Joe Biden uniquely qualified for this moment? Neilia's original flat headstone there reads, "Death lies on her like an early frost, upon the sweetest flower of all the field," a slightly altered quote from Shakespeare's "Romeo & Juliet."ĭELAWARE'S OWN: Americans are grieving. his mother, Jean and his elder son, Beau. The Biden family plot there also includes the graves of Biden's father, Joseph Sr. Joseph's on the Brandywine in Greenville, the Catholic church where the Biden family now worships.
Neilia and Naomi Biden were buried in All Saints Cemetery off Kirkwood Highway, but the graves were later moved to the cemetery at St.
He has been known to attend funerals, once for a woman who donated $18 to every one of his campaigns. For the past 40 years, he has privately comforted grieving people in Delaware. Grief and tragedy have come to define Biden as a politician and now as president. "I don't know the Kennedys, but I don't think they could be half as great as the Bidens," Neilia told The News Journal.Ī HOLIDAY MYSTERY: Who is decorating 2 trees in Hockessin? Some wonder if there is a Biden crash connection. When Biden was a New Castle County councilman, The News Journal likened the Bidens to the Kennedys. Neilia, a Republican, registered to become a Democrat. When Biden first started his career in politics, she helped organize her husband’s campaigns.
Neilia, The News Journal reported at the time, had ambition to get her doctorate and teach at a college when her children were older. The couple married in 1966 and moved to Delaware to begin their family. “He was Irish Catholic and we were Scotch Presbyterian, but they liked him too much to say no.”Ī LASTING LEGACY: Neilia Hunter Biden, the brains behind Joe Biden's first victories "I guess the only time I got in trouble with my parents was when I wanted to marry Joe,” Neilia told The News Journal in an interview. She earned a master's degree in education from Syracuse and taught English and worked with children with cognitive disabilities. Neilia and Amy died six weeks later in a car accident in Hockessin. In this November 1972 photo, Neilia Hunter Biden holds baby daughter Naomi "Amy" and talks to the crowd celebrating Joe Biden's stunning upset over J.