Members of Tennessee’s execution team repeatedly struggled to place functioning IV lines in Christa Pike’s arms before her attempted execution, at one point warning that some of her veins may have ruptured, or “blown,” before the lethal injection was administered, according to a court filing submitted Thursday by her attorney.

The medical team used roughly 10 needles and attempted access at several locations on both arms, attorney Randy Spivey wrote. Even after establishing the final IV, team members reportedly had difficulty flushing it with saline. The filing offers the most extensive account yet of the execution attempt.

Pike, 50, survived two doses of pentobarbital during the Sept. 30 execution attempt and was later hospitalized. The state had sought to put her to death for the 1995 stabbing murder of her classmate, Colleen Slemmer. Pike was 18 when she and her boyfriend tortured and killed Slemmer, making her one of the youngest women ever sentenced to death.

Tennessee’s execution procedures require officials to administer a second dose of pentobarbital if the first does not cause death. However, the protocol does not explain how officials should proceed if the person remains alive after the second injection.

After the failed execution, Pike spent several days on a ventilator in a hospital. Her attorneys at one point feared she would not survive, but she eventually regained consciousness and was returned to prison after her release from medical care.

The incident has intensified questions about Tennessee’s lethal injection procedures. Spivey’s filing was submitted in a separate case in which death row prisoners are challenging the state’s method of carrying out executions.

“Our predictions about the likelihood of botched executions have come true — and will continue to come true — without substantial change,” said Kit Thomas, an attorney representing death row prisoners in the case.

Nearly an hour of IV attempts

According to Spivey, the execution team began attempting to place the two IVs required under Tennessee protocol at 6:34 p.m. When the team encountered difficulties, Pike tried to assist, suggesting they search for a usable vein higher up on her arm.

An IV was inserted into Pike’s right arm in about six minutes. Establishing a second line in her left arm took nearly an hour.

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Pike winced and grimaced as team members moved needles inside her left arm, Spivey wrote. The workers repeatedly voiced uncertainty about whether the lines had been placed correctly.

At 6:57 p.m., one team member said a vein in Pike’s left arm might be “blowing,” while two others said they could not determine whether that had happened. One of them reportedly said words to the effect of, “It’s either blood or blown, I need to know,” according to the filing.

The team then tried another location in Pike’s left arm. When the needle was removed, it appeared to be badly bent, Spivey said. At 7:07 p.m., he recalled hearing a team member say, “I think it’s blown.” After additional attempts, officials concluded at 7:13 p.m. that the left-arm IV was working. Pike’s hands were secured, and she was connected to a heart monitor.

Pike complained of burning arm pain

About five minutes later, a series of calls began between the execution chamber and the adjoining room where officials were responsible for pushing pentobarbital into the IV lines. Spivey wrote that the calls appeared to involve repeated requests for the IV team to inspect Pike’s left arm.

The exact time the pentobarbital entered the IV lines remains unclear. At 7:34 p.m., however, Pike complained that her arm was hurting.

“I feel like my arm is about to bust. It burns,” Pike said, according to Spivey. She continued speaking with her spiritual adviser for roughly 10 more minutes before beginning to make what the attorney described as an “agitated snoring sound.”

For the next half-hour, Pike strained, flinched, moved her head and appeared to have difficulty breathing, Spivey wrote. When he asked to use a telephone, he said officials took him on a seven-minute route through the facility rather than allowing him to use the phone in the execution witness room.

At 8:22 p.m., Spivey called other attorneys and asked them to intervene, saying Tennessee’s protocol did not authorize a third dose of pentobarbital. He then returned to the witness room and told the deputy attorney general that Pike required immediate medical attention.

Spivey was informed at 8:50 p.m. that an ambulance was on its way. Twenty minutes later, he was told that medical personnel were performing life-saving measures. An ambulance was seen arriving at the hospital at 9:14 p.m., according to the filing.

Some 50 radical Antifa cells within a broader network of nearly 300 groups are mobilizing ahead of this weekend’s demonstrations in France, raising concerns that the protests could descend into disorder and violence, News Media has learned.

Self-described Antifa organizations are coordinating with communist, socialist, far-left and anti-Israel groups on two major initiatives: an “anti-fascist village” in Orléans targeting conservative leader Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, and nationwide Acte II demonstrations intended to repeat the unrest seen last weekend.

A News Media investigation identified 287 organizations in France’s growing protest network. The groups include 50 that explicitly identify as Antifa, 27 communist, socialist, Trotskyist or revolutionary-left organizations, 24 labor unions, and a widening alliance of far-left groups focused on Israel, migrant rights, the environment, feminism, transgender issues and other causes. Although the demonstrations are being presented as a youth-education movement, only 27 of the organizations identified are student or youth groups.

The coordinated activity is unfolding alongside a broader international campaign involving communist, socialist and left-wing groups in Greece, Italy, Spain, India and other countries.

News Media has assembled an ongoing guide to the organizations involved in what some have labeled “Chaos Inc.” The directory will be updated as new groups and activities emerge.

The scale of the effort is a sharp increase from the 54 organizations identified during last weekend’s riots. By early Friday morning in Paris, organizers had listed 649 Acte II actions, including demonstrations at 21 train stations, three ports, two oil depots and one refinery.

News Media reviewed dozens of pages of planning documents and social media posts that indicate organizers have developed a coordinated campaign supported by funding, transportation, logistics and a communications network.

Fundraising drives, transport arrangements, youth outreach, prewritten campaign materials and a centralized information hub point to a mobilization structure that was in place days before protesters were expected to take to the streets. Organizers also anticipated the display of hammer-and-sickle and Palestinian flags.

A French administrative court reportedly overturned a Paris police order banning street protests. The ruling had not been made public, however, and it remained unclear whether it would affect similar orders issued in other cities.

Organizers have already begun preparing additional actions, including Acte III on Oct. 31, a larger strike and blockade campaign on Nov. 5, and a Europe-wide mobilization scheduled for Nov. 20.

In France, the groups identified by the investigation fall primarily into two organizing streams: the Ciao Fachos, or “Good-bye Fascists,” coalition planning the Orléans event, and the Acte II, or “Action 2,” campaign led by the Yellow Vests group that organized last week’s unrest. Participating organizations have signed a roster and a separate list for the Orléans demonstration.

“Macron must leave and make way for the people!” Acte II organizers said in a call urging “Yellow vests, high school students, university students, workers” to join “demonstrations, roundabouts and blockades, everywhere in France.”

Last September, following the killing of conservative leader Charlie Kirk by an alleged leftist gunman, President Donald Trump signed an executive order designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. Trump later issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 targeting far-left groups. The memorandum said that “groups and entities that perpetuate this extremism have created a movement that embraces and elevates violence to achieve policy outcomes, including justifying additional assassinations.”

Despite the presence of groups around the world that use Antifa in their names, former FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress in 2020 that Antifa was “not a group or an organization,” but instead “a movement or an ideology.”

In the United States, far-left activists may carry flags bearing the word “ANTIFASCIST,” but they generally do not operate through a single formal national organization called “Antifa.” That decentralized structure has fueled repeated denials that Antifa exists as an organization.

The structure is different in Europe, where activists openly use the Antifa name, antifascist banners and flags bearing the emblems of local chapters. A News Media investigation found that this broader network is helping mobilize activists for another weekend of protests across France.

Last November, the State Department designated four European groups linked to Antifa as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specifically Designated Global Terrorists: Antifa Ost in Germany; the International Revolutionary Front, also known as the Informal Anarchist Federation, in Italy; and Armed Proletarian Justice and Revolutionary Class Self Defense in Greece. The groups were accused of organizing or carrying out bombings, shootings and other politically motivated attacks.

Antifa chapters around the world have built their movement around opposition to what they describe as “fascism.” Critics, however, accuse them of using threats, intimidation, harassment, violence and property destruction, as well as tactics they say can become coercive and dangerous. Critics also argue that the term “fascism,” echoing language used in propaganda from Russia, China and Iran, has increasingly become a broad political label applied to Western democracies.

For example, late last year, Neville Roy Singham, an American-born communist tech tycoon living in China, took to the stage at the Golden Tulip Hotel in Shanghai for a “Global South” conference and critiqued the alleged “fascism” of the United States.

Days ago, News Media reported exclusively that an internal State Department assessment warns that antifascist groups could participate in a “potentially more confrontational protest” this weekend that could “expose further security shortcomings and deepen political tensions.”

Now, the organizations themselves provide a look inside the infrastructure being assembled on the ground.

Free Buses to the “Antifascist Village”

On Friday night, a bus is set to leave Marseille at about 9 p.m. local time for Orléans, in a journey organized by “La Riposte Antifasciste Marseille,” established in October 2023 with a “strategy of massification of anti-fascism.” In its promotion, the pilgrimage leaders tell followers, “Anti-fascism is everyone’s business.” It’s joined by Marseille Unite Communiste Libertaire.

Other organizing materials advertise collective transportation from locations including Paris, Saint-Denis, Stains and Brest.

The logistical preparations provide a more concrete measure of organization than simply finding similar flags or slogans at demonstrations.

On Saturday morning, at 8 a.m., in the city of Bagnolet outside Paris, the Assemblée Antifasciste de Bagnolet, or “Bagnolet Antifascist Assembly” has plans in place to meet at the town hall, Mairie de Bagnolet, on Rue Hoche for a two-hour ride to Orléans. Its online sign-up sheet advertises 50 free seats.

La Marche des Solidarites, or “The March for Solidarity,” an online hub, directs supporters in the Paris region to buses leaving from Saturday morning from Place de la République in Saint-Denis and Stains with #NousToutes and Carré Citoyen.

On Instagram, Saint-Denis Antifa, Carre Citoyen and Marche des Solidarites are sending people to a fundraising page on the Solidaire website, where organizers have raised about $13,300 for expenses for the Saturday action, including the “printing of mobilization materials: leaflets, posters, etc.” and a “truck/sound system for a large procession of the solidarity march.”

The Saint-Denis Antifa also made crêpes last week at the Saint-Denis Hip-Hop Festival to raise money for the protest.

And organizers have centralized the machinery for mobilization online. Adults are facilitating space for high-school students, telling them, “free places are for you.”

The Marche des Solidarités online repository on antiracisme-solidarite.org describes itself as a place containing “all the information to mobilize,” including “calls, signatories, visuals, etc.”

Ciao Fachos has gone further. Its organizing documents call for “tractages, collages, réunions publiques, récoltes de fonds, transports collectifs” — distributing leaflets, putting up posters, holding public meetings, fundraising and organizing collective transportation.

The group also urges activists to prevent National Rally supporters from distributing literature at markets or putting posters on walls.

READ MORE: Gabby Petito Legal Fight Could Shape Charlie Kirk Family’s Utah Case

The network has also advertised Signal channels, much like far-left activists have done in the U.S., to swap information and coordinate logistics.

A Two-Day Orléans Antifa Operation

The schedule is carefully organized with Antifa groups like Loiret Antifasciste, which is promoting a detailed program. The group’s own declaration describes the objective as larger than opposing a single National Rally convention.

Building a “mouvement antifasciste,” or “antifascist movement,” is a “collective responsibility,” the organization says, calling for a united political front.

For Saturday, organizers advertise:

• 10:30 a.m. — A demonstration beginning near the Cathédrale Sainte-Croix d’Orléans, including a “Ciao Fachos” procession.
• 1 p.m. — An “antifascist village” at Campo Santo with food, political roundtables and other activities, including a plan to “parade together behind a common banner” of “anti-racism” and “anti-fascism.”
• Evening — Food, concerts and accommodations for activists.

On Sunday, Ciao Fachos advertised another demonstration toward CO’Met, the location of the National Rally gathering.

The Association France Palestine Solidarité says its members will participate in a Palestinian contingent during Saturday’s demonstration and operate a stand at the antifascist village until 10 p.m. Protest leaders chose the last protest date of Oct. 17 to memorialize a protest on the same day in 1961 when a protest by Algerian “martyrs” turned deadly in Paris.

Organizations include Urgence Palestine Orléans, AGIR POUR LA PALESTINE, Union juive française pour la paix, migrant-rights organizations including FASTI, Droits Devant!!, Coordination Sans-Papiers 75, La Cimade Aix-en-Provence, Tous Réfugiés, GASPROM-ASTI Nantes, ASTI Orléans, the Association des Travailleurs Maghrébins de France and UJFP, the French Jewish Union for Peace, which is promoting the demonstration.

The CGT Paris, the Paris branch of one of France’s largest labor confederations, is also organizing transportation to the demonstration and published the Loiret Antifaciste coalition’s call for an antifascist movement.

Solidaires 37, the Indre-et-Loire branch of the left-wing labor federation, is organizing pay-what-you-can transportation from Tours.

The coalition lists demonstrate how explicitly antifascist organizations operate inside a considerably larger political coalition.

Antifa Joins ‘Acte II’

The Orléans demonstration isn’t the only place explicit Antifa organizations are mobilizing Saturday.

News Media separately identified antifascist groups attached directly to local Acte II demonstrations.

In Angoulême, Action Antifasciste 16, also known as Action AntiFa16, appears as an official collaborator on an Oct. 24 Acte II announcement alongside NPA Charente, Révolution Permanente Angoulême, Maison des Peuples et de la Paix, Fanfare en lutte d’Angoulême and Organisation de Solidarité Trans Angoulême.

In the city of Caen, the “Caen Antifa Squad” appears as a collaborator on another announcement explicitly advertising “ACTE II — 24 OCTOBRE.”

The presence of Antifa groups provides a connective point between the nationwide Yellow Vest mobilization and the antifascist ecosystem.

One of the figures attempting to bring the different grievances together is Benjamin Ball, editor of the website coordinating the Yellow Vest action map.

“Our role is to make sure that the social anger aggregates,” Ball recently told French media, saying organizers want representatives of different sectors received at the Élysée.

Communists, Socialists and Antifa

French Antifa activism substantially overlaps with anarchist, communist, anticapitalist and revolutionary-socialist networks whose organizations frequently cooperate in demonstrations and campaigns.

The Oct. 24 coalition illustrates those connections.

Union Communiste Libertaire, a libertarian-communist organization advocating revolutionary political change, has joined the mobilization.

The revolutionary socialist Nouveau Parti anticapitaliste, or NPA, is promoting the Orléans demonstration. Its publication “L’Anticapitaliste” reported that dozens of organizations were mobilizing against the RN congress.

La France Insoumise, the French Communist Party, Union pour la Reconstruction Communiste and Le Poing Levé appear in the wider local coalition.

The coalition also includes labor organizations, environmental activists and student groups, such as Fédération Syndicale Étudiante, a left-wing student union already involved in France’s October student revolt, is joining the mobilization.

Extinction Rebellion France is represented through its Île-de-France organization. Its agitators rappelled the Marianne statue and hoisted a vest with an anti-police message, creating the iconic image used for the next phase of activation.

And the coalition includes feminist organizations such as NousToutes, whose current social-media material is promoting transportation to Orléans and mobilization resources.

Labor Unions Move Activists to Orléans with Antifa

Organized labor is providing another piece of the mobilization infrastructure.

Along with CGT Paris and Solidaires 37, the expanded roster includes CNT Fédération Éducation, CNT 49, CNT Education 93, SNETAP-FSU, Solidaires 44, Solidaires 35, SUD Protection Sociale 93 and CGT ArianeGroup Issac, among other labor organizations.

VISA 93, part of the Vigilance et Initiatives Syndicales Antifascistes labor-antifascist network, has promoted union transportation for the demonstration.

Meanwhile, as Antifa and other leftist agitators readied for the weekend, French authorities arrested a 34-year-old man, Hodei Docampo Ciarra, this week in the town of Val d’Issoire (Haute-Vienne). Police suspect him of being one of the rioters who devastated City Hall in Limoges, torching the building.

French police said he was allegedly involved in the “ultra-left.”

They arrested the man, 34, at about 6:15 a.m. as he got out of bed at his parents’ home.

“Tragedy revisits the Kennedys,” declared The New York Times, reflecting on a family marked by “unfinished journeys” and “magnetic personalities” whose lives ended far too soon.

The editorial appeared in July 1999, after John F Kennedy Jr, his wife Carolyn Bessette, and her sister Lauren died when the small plane Kennedy was piloting plunged into the Atlantic Ocean near Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.

Coming from the famously restrained “Gray Lady,” the language was striking. It also fed a question that has followed the Kennedy family for generations: could the repeated tragedies surrounding America’s most prominent political dynasty really amount to a curse?

The Kennedys have endured an extraordinary succession of loss. Plane crashes, fatal accidents, drug overdoses and political assassinations have repeatedly cut short the lives of family members and left an indelible mark on the dynasty’s history.

The Times’ tribute to President John F Kennedy’s only son and his wife came before several more devastating episodes. In 2011, Kara Kennedy, the daughter of Ted Kennedy, died of a heart attack. A year later, Mary Richardson Kennedy, the former wife of Robert F Kennedy Jr, died by suicide.

Further grief followed in 2019, when Saoirse Kennedy Hill, Robert F Kennedy’s granddaughter, died from an accidental drug overdose. The following year, another RFK grandchild, Maeve Kennedy McKean, and her eight-year-old son, Gideon, drowned during a brief canoe trip on Chesapeake Bay.

Late last year, Tatiana Schlossberg, the granddaughter of JFK, died from cancer at the age of 35.

Now the family is mourning another loss. Kyle Kennedy, 42, died at her home in Westwood, Massachusetts, on September 21.

The Kennedy family is enormous. Robert and Ethel Kennedy had 11 children and 34 grandchildren, but the sheer number of premature deaths has been so unsettling that some relatives have reportedly wondered whether coincidence alone can explain the pattern.

After Ted Kennedy survived a 1964 plane crash, his wife Joan reportedly told her sister-in-law Jackie, the widowed former First Lady, that the family was cursed. Ted suffered three crushed vertebrae, broken ribs and a punctured lung in the accident, which occurred a year after the assassination of his brother, President John F Kennedy.

“Look at everything that has happened. Can we really dismiss it all as coincidence?” Joan was reported to have asked Jackie.

The circumstances surrounding Kyle’s death have not been disclosed, and authorities are still investigating. A local funeral home’s online obituary said only that the mother of two had died “peacefully.”

Kyle was the daughter of Michael Kennedy and Denise Gifford, whose father was NFL great Frank Gifford. She was also the niece of Robert F Kennedy Jr, the Health and Human Services Secretary. Kyle is survived by her two children, Conor, 12, and Declan, ten, whom she had with her former husband, Liam Kerr. Conor’s twin sister, Josie, died two days after birth.

Kyle was just 13 when her father, Michael, died in 1997. He struck a tree while taking part in a family game of “ski football” in Aspen, Colorado, in which participants tossed a ball between them as they skied.

She later became a teacher and generally avoided the intense public attention often associated with the Kennedy name. One unusual moment in the spotlight came in 2012, when her cousin Conor Kennedy reportedly arrived at her wedding with his then-girlfriend, Taylor Swift. Swift maintained that she had been invited and said Kyle had thanked her for attending.

Kyle, a committed long-distance runner, suffered a serious spinal cord injury in 2020 that left her with permanent paralysis. Although the cause was never made public, she went on to advocate for people living with disabilities.

According to her obituary, ‘the years that followed [her injury] brought struggles but Kyle fought to maintain her dry wit and determination through it all, trying to be the best possible mother to her sons and caring for her two beloved, ill-behaved Wheaten terriers.’ 

Having big families has long been a strong tradition within the Roman Catholic family, inevitably increasing the odds that some of them will meet with fatal mishaps.

However, the trend in the Kennedy family surely goes way beyond the laws of probability.

Family patriarch, businessman, ambassador and serial philanderer Joseph Kennedy, had nine children with wife Rose.

The eldest, Joseph Jr, died in 1944 when his B-24 Liberator bomber plane, packed with high explosives, blew up over East Anglia in the UK while flying towards a target in Nazi-occupied France during World War II.

Kathleen, nicknamed ‘Kick,’ was the favorite daughter of Joseph Sr and Rose although she certainly tested their love in 1944 when she married a Protestant, albeit a British aristocrat – William ‘Billy’ Cavendish, the Marquess of Hartington.

Just five weeks later, he was killed by a sniper’s bullet while serving in the British Army in France.

Five years on, the Dowager Marchioness of Hartington – as she was titled – fell for another British nobleman, the womanizing Earl Fitzwilliam.

He was another Anglican but, confident she could win over her staunchly Catholic parents, Kick, then 28, arranged to fly with Fitzwilliam to see her father in France in 1948. Their plane, a chartered De Havilland Dove, stopped to refuel in Paris but, after a long lunch, the couple discovered that bad weather had set in.

Their pilot warned it was too dangerous to fly but Kick – used to getting her own way and, on this occasion, also a little drunk – insisted they go on.

The following day, the wreckage of their plane was found in France’s Rhone-Alpes region. Everyone on board was dead and Kick’s body had to be taken down a mountainside to the nearest village on an ox cart.

In 1955, George and Ann Skakel – the parents of Ethel, wife of Robert F Kennedy – were both killed in a plane crash in Oklahoma. The following year, John F Kennedy’s daughter, Arabella, died at birth. Her baby brother, Patrick, died from breathing difficulties two days after his premature birth in 1963.

JFK himself was the next family casualty just three months later. Jack, who had been injured during the war during a torpedo boat raid in the Pacific, was shot in 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald as he was riding in a presidential motorcade in Dallas, an assassination that shocked the world and is still furiously debated by armchair detectives and conspiracy theorists. 

Outside the hospital where JFK was taken, brother Ted announced that his parents had now lost their first four children.

That, however, was not true. Their oldest daughter, Rose Marie, known to everyone as Rosemary or Rosie, was not dead as her family claimed.

Born in 1918, she had been a difficult birth which left her with brain damage and learning difficulties. Her parents, intent on producing a family of glamorous, high-achievers, saw her as ‘defective’ and kept her at home.

By 1940, when she was 22, her behavior had become irritable, sometimes violent, while her signs of unsatisfied sexual desire made her parents worry she might end up becoming pregnant.

When she started sneaking out at night from the convent school she attended in Washington DC, her father, terrified of family scandal, resorted to drastic measures and, in late 1941, had her lobotomized. The operation was botched, leaving Rosemary speechless and crippled. With therapy, she eventually learned to walk and use one arm.

Rosemary, who had the mental capacity of a toddler, was hidden out of sight from the public for the rest of her life, until her death at the age of 86 in 2005.

Fifty-seven of those years were spent being cared for by nuns at St Coletta’s convent, a school for ‘exceptional children’ in Jefferson, Wisconsin.

The Hitler-admiring Joe Kennedy Sr once remarked with the cold-heartedness for which he was infamous: ‘I don’t know what it is that makes eight children shine like a dollar and another one dull. I guess it’s the hand of God.’

In 1968, a year before his death, the hand of God, or more precisely Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan, deprived Joe of yet another child by shooting dead Senator Robert F Kennedy, aged 42, as he was campaigning for the US presidency in a Los Angeles hotel.

If there was a Kennedy ‘curse,’ it didn’t only doom members of the family but sometimes those who were unlucky enough to cross their path. 

The most famous of these was surely Mary Jo Kopechne, a 28-year-old worker in RFK’s campaign team who made the fatal mistake of accepting a lift from her boss’s brother, Ted, after a party on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts, in July 1969.

Insisting on driving despite being drunk, Ted lost control of his car as he was driving over a bridge and pitched it into a tidal channel. He managed to escape from the overturned car and says he dived repeatedly to try to save his passenger.

However, he swam to shore and left the scene, only reporting the accident the following morning, by which time Kopechne’s body had already been recovered from the car. Critics believe Ted delayed reporting the crash, possibly condemning her to drown, because he needed to sober up before he called the police.

Although he won re-election to the Senate and kept his seat until 2009, Kennedy’s political career was permanently besmirched – he gave up trying to run for the presidency – by the controversy.

In 1974, another woman associated with the Kennedys – Athalia Lindsley, a model and dancer who had dated Joseph Jr until his death in 1944 – was murdered in her home in Florida. A neighbor with whom she had feuded was charged with her killing but acquitted, leaving the case officially unsolved.

The next Kennedy to pass prematurely was David, son of RFK, who died of a drug overdose in Palm Beach, Florida, in 1984. He was 28 and had led a troubled life since his father’s assassination, becoming addicted to heroin and alcohol.

At the age of 13, he had been watching television alone in a Los Angeles hotel room and saw his father being fatally shot as he celebrated his victory in the California Democratic Presidential primary.

At a family outing in Malibu the previous day, the boy had got into trouble while swimming in the sea but was rescued from an undertow by his father.

But it was in 1999 that the catastrophe which well and truly put the Kennedy curse back in the headlines occurred.

Fifty one years after his great aunt, Kick, the dowager marchioness, defied a pilot’s advice that the weather was too bad to fly, 38-year-old JFK’s only son John F Kennedy Jr did the same and ignored two experienced flyers who warned him against trying to fly his single-engine Piper Saratoga plane on a short flight from New Jersey to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts so he, his wife Carolyn Bessette and her sister Lauren could attend a friend’s cocktail party.

John Jr, a keen but inexperienced aviator who didn’t help matters by being on crutches after breaking his ankle in a paragliding accident (he was using the painkiller Vicodin) made a serious piloting error within 11 minutes of take-off when he crossed the path of a passenger jet. 

Less than an hour later, about seven miles out from Martha’s Vineyard, the Piper went into a spin which pilots call a ‘graveyard spiral.’ Out of control for up to 30 seconds, the small aircraft fell from 2,200ft and crashed into the sea, killing all three on board.

Many of the Kennedy deaths have clearly been down to nothing more than terribly bad luck but others follow a tradition of dangerously risky behavior.

According to biographer Edward Klein, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, widow of JFK, believed that thrill-seeking behavior may have owed more to genetics than the supernatural and after her attention was drawn to a ground-breaking 1993 report by molecular geneticists.

The scientists announced that they had discovered a variant of the gene that makes the protein receptor for dopamine, the brain’s chemical messenger, in the portion of the brain that controls personality.

Klein said Jackie told him that several things interested her about the discovery. Fifty percent of people with Attention Deficit Disorder, like her son John, were found to have the rare variant of the DRD4 7R gene.

People who abuse alcohol and drugs, of whom the Kennedy family has had more than its share, are also more likely to possess the gene than those who are not addicted to alcohol and drugs. 

Most important of all, Jackie was fascinated by the nickname the scientists gave to the gene. They called it the ‘thrill-seeking gene.’

Dr Robert Moyzis, professor of molecular genetics at the University of California at Irvine, told Klein: ‘The best evidence that the gene DRD4 7R probably runs in the Kennedy family is in the consistent thrill-seeking behavior of its members.

‘Individuals with this gene are always out on the edge, taking more chances than most other people… And since, over the years, they’ve enjoyed uncommon success, that behavior has become reinforced and part of their family culture.

‘That is why so many spectacular things happen to them. But it’s also why they are always setting themselves up for a big fall.’

PROVO, Utah — A Utah Supreme Court case arising from the 2021 murder of Gabby Petito could help clear a legal path for Charlie Kirk’s family to file a wrongful death lawsuit over alleged security lapses at the Turning Point USA event where he was killed last year, an attorney involved in the appeal said.

“Right now, Kirk’s claims, if filed, would likely be dismissed, like Gabby Petito’s claims were dismissed on that basis,” said Brian Stewart, an attorney for Petito’s family who is working on the Utah wrongful death appeal. “We would need the Utah Supreme Court to overturn Tiede to pave the way for Charlie Kirk’s family to proceed.”

The reference is to Tiede, a 1996 Utah Supreme Court ruling that upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit connected to the 1990 murders of Kay Tiede and her mother, Beth Potts. The two Texas women were killed by two parolees who attacked their family after leaving a halfway house, according to the Deseret News, which reported on the case at the time.

The ruling affirmed the constitutionality of Utah’s governmental immunity law as it applies to wrongful death claims. Stewart said the law bars such claims against government entities when the injury results from an assault or battery committed by a third party.

At the heart of the Petito family’s appeal is its contention that the Utah Constitution prevents lawmakers from restricting or eliminating the right to seek damages for wrongful death.

The family sued the Moab Police Department, alleging that officers acted negligently during a traffic stop involving Brian Laundrie two weeks before he killed Petito. A judge dismissed the lawsuit under governmental immunity protections.

Kirk’s family filed a notice of claim in September, taking the first step toward a potential lawsuit. Their attorneys alleged that Utah Valley University, the state of Utah and several officials failed to secure the event adequately, despite acknowledging responsibility for rooftop security. The alleged failures, they said, contributed to Kirk’s wrongful death on Sept. 10, 2025.

The filing alleges that UVU Police Chief Jeffrey Long told Turning Point USA organizers, “I got you covered,” after they raised concerns about access to rooftops overlooking the campus courtyard.

Prosecutors allege that a sniper positioned on a rooftop across the courtyard shot and killed Kirk.

Still, Stewart said, the text message may not be sufficient to overcome Utah’s broad governmental immunity protections.

“It’s another act of negligence that contributed to Charlie’s vulnerability and ultimate death, but it really wouldn’t change the applicability of the statute,” Stewart said. “It’s similar in the Petito case. The parents of Gabby might have brought her home, might have intervened, but they relied on the analysis of the police on the scene, who said, ‘It’s no big deal, we’re not even gonna arrest anybody.’”

That response gave the impression that the situation was under control, Stewart said, comparing it with Long’s alleged assurance to the organizers.

The Petito family maintains that Tiede does not govern its case. Alternatively, the family argues the precedent should be overturned because the Utah Constitution states: “The right of action to recover damages for injuries resulting in death, shall never be abrogated.”

Stewart said attorneys for Kirk’s family have also taken steps toward a possible federal lawsuit.

Tyler Robinson, the 23-year-old man accused of killing Kirk, pleaded not guilty through his attorneys at an arraignment on Sept. 1. If convicted of aggravated murder, the top charge, he could face the death penalty.

He’s due in court Friday afternoon for a scheduling hearing.