Joan Kennedy found unconscious on street by a neighbor

A neighbor found Joan Bennett Kennedy lying on Beacon Street suffering a concussion and broken shoulder earlier this week. She said that she had no idea the woman was a member of one of America’s best-known political families when she helped her up and they waited together for an ambulance.

“We’re indebted to some anonymous pedestrian who found her and picked her up and got her help,” Patrick Kennedy said. “I’m enormously grateful for whoever it is out there who did that. She wouldn’t be here in this hospital, recuperating, if that person hadn’t called and gotten someone to come.”

Constance Bacon, 35, an artist who lives in the affluent Back Bay neighborhood where Kennedy has a condominium, said she was returning home from the gym on Monday evening when she saw a well-dressed woman sprawled on the sidewalk in the rain. There was a visible cut on her head.

“She said she was OK, but she didn’t look OK,” Bacon said.

Bacon helped her to her feet and called EMS. She held her umbrella over Kennedy’s head as the two waited together on the sidewalk until an ambulance arrived five minutes later. Bacon said she didn’t know who Kennedy was until a television crew came to her home on Wednesday.

Bennett Kennedy, 68, was taken to Tufts New England Medical Center around 3 a.m. on Tuesday. She was later transferred to Massachusetts General Hospital, where she was recovering yesterday.

A close friend and neighbor, Stephanie Warburg of Boston, said yesterday that Joan Kennedy called her from the hospital and told she’d hurt her shoulder and elbow and would be unable to keep their dinner plans for Wednesday night.
“She’s just a lovely, decent person and everyone adores her,” said Warburg, who said she’s known Kennedy for 25 years. “All of us just feel badly.”

Details of what happened were unclear and there was no police report on the incident. Joan Kennedy, who splits time between a home on Cape Cod and a Boston condominium, has struggled with alcoholism. She spent time in a number of rehabilitation programs following a series of arrests for drunken driving.

Joan Kennedy worked as an advocate for the mentally retarded and for cancer research and was a supporter of the Pine Street Inn, a Boston-based homeless shelter, and Children’s Hospital.

Sen. Kennedy said yesterday that he’s proud of his children for their loyalty to his ex-wife. “This has been a sad time,” he said. “We’re hoping for the best.”
The couple had three children together — Kara Kennedy Allen, 45, Edward M. Kennedy, Jr., 44, and Patrick Kennedy, 37 — before divorcing in 1982.
The three children recently took temporary guardianship of their mother to ensure she receives treatment for her alcoholism. Patrick Kennedy is seeking to become her permanent legal guardian.

“You want to make sure there is someone there for her all the time … but at the same time you don’t want to encroach on her privacy too much,” Patrick Kennedy said. “When things like this happen, it makes you feel as though maybe you should have done more to make sure there is someone with her 24/7 and perhaps that might become necessary.”

Patrick Kennedy announced yesterday that he has decided not to run for the Senate in 2006.