Diagnosis of memory and resource leaks is regarded as one of the most significant challenges for software developers [1]. Many academic studies, tools, and language features address this challenge and propose techniques for avoidance, diagnosis, and repair of leak-related bugs (with certain emphasis on memory leaks). Evaluation, comparison, and improvement of these techniques can be demanding due to the high effort of reproducing real-world bugs, lack of common benchmarks, and limited knowledge of the characteristics and the distribution of these issues. Thus, a comprehensive data set and empirically grounded understanding of the properties of leak-inducing defects, how the leaks manifest, and how they are repaired can greatly support the progress in this domain. To this end, we conducted a comprehensive empirical study on 491 real-world memory and resource leak defects collected from issue trackers of 15 open-source Java applications. We analyzed a large number of aspects of the collected issues and their repair patches ranging from distribution of leak types to common repair patterns found in patches. Our study significantly complements previous work [2, 3] and expands the research body of empirical studies in terms of detection types, root causes, and repair types of leak-related defects in Java. Our findings and conclusions can be of relevance for designing approaches and tools for diagnosis of leak-related defects, for debugging practices, and for automated repair approaches.