Annapolis: Divers and boats plan to resume searching Monday in the Chesapeake Bay for the bodies of the daughter and a grandson of former Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, authorities said.
Kennedy Townsend, who served two terms as Maryland’s lieutenant governor, is the eldest daughter of the late US Attorney General and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and niece of the late President John F. Kennedy.
The search began last Thursday after a report of a canoe in the bay that didn’t return to shore after apparently being overtaken by strong winds. Searchers on Saturday and Sunday reported no signs of the canoiests and their effort will resume Monday after an overnight pause, a Maryland Natural Resources Police news release said late Sunday.
The missing canoeists were identified as Maeve Kennedy Townsend McKean, 40, and McKean’s 8-year-old son, Gideon Joseph Kennedy McKean.
“With profound sadness, I share the news that the search for my beloved daughter Maeve and grandson Gideon has turned from rescue to recovery,” Kathleen Kennedy Townsend had said in a statement Friday night.
Vessels during the weekend conducted sonar operations around the area where the two were last seen and where their overturned canoe was recovered, according to police.
The mother and son may have been paddling the canoe from a home in Shady Side, Maryland, to retrieve a ball and couldn’t paddle back to shore, police said earlier.
Maeve McKean, a public health and human rights lawyer, served as executive director of the Georgetown University Global Health Initiative.
Tragedies in the family
It looks to be the latest chapter of heartbreak for a family that has suffered tragedy after tragedy, in the form of untimely deaths, since President Kennedy himself was assassinated in Dallas in 1963.
RFK was himself slain in 1968 as he campaigned for president five years after his brother’s death.
In 1999 John F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife and sister-in-law died when the small plane he was piloting crashed off the Massachusetts coast.
Saoirse Kennedy Hill, a granddaughter of RFK, died of what was ruled an accidental drug overdose last year at age 22.
David Kennedy, a son of Robert, died at age 28 of a cocaine overdose at a Florida hotel in 1984.
Another son of RFK, Michael, died in a skiing accident in Colorado in 1997.
