RFK Jr. Solves Years-Long Mystery Of Dead Bear Cub In Central Park

UPPER WEST SIDE, NY – A nearly decade-old mystery of a dead bear cub found under an abandoned bicycle was solved on Sunday when presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took responsibility for dropping the animal's body in Central Park.

Almost 10 years ago, Upper West Side resident Florence Slatkin was walking in Central Park with her dog, a Chihuahua mix named Paco, and a friend, when she spotted the dead black bear cub.

“At first, I thought it was a raccoon,” Slatkin told the New York Times, which wrote about the incident, then a bizarre New York City mystery.

But on Sunday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. posted a video to X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, where he explained what happened.

Picking Up Roadkill

In the video, Kennedy is speaking with comedian and television star Roseanne Barr, who says nothing during their exchange other than “uh oh,” near the video’s conclusion.

“I was taking a group of people falconing” – or the hunting of wild game with a trained raptor, as one does – “near Goshen,” Kennedy explained, referring to a small town in the Hudson Valley near Legoland New York Resort.

“I was driving up really early, like 7, and then a woman in front of me in a van hit a bear and killed it, a young bear,” Kennedy explains in the video.

“So I pulled over and I pick up the bear and put him in the back of my van, because I was going to skin the bear, it was very good condition,” he continues, “and put the meat in my refrigerator.”

Bear meat is consumed, although not known to be particularly flavorful. Those who do partake say the meat is “usually good or very good, unless the animal has been feeding on fish,” according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, where this type of activity is presumably more common.

Nevertheless, “you can do that in New York State, you can get a bear tag for a roadkill bear,” Kennedy said in the video.

The falconing went long – “we had a really good day” – and instead of returning to his home in Westchester, Kennedy went to the city for a dinner at Peter Luger Steak House in Brooklyn.

That dinner went late, and Kennedy realized he wouldn’t be able to go home to drop the bear off, because he had to catch a flight.

“The bear was in my car and I didn’t want to leave it in the car, because that would have been bad,” Kennedy said.

"It'll be funny for people"

“This was a little bit of the redneck in me. There’d been a series of bicycle accidents in New York, they’d just put in the bike lanes, and a couple of people had gotten killed,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy does not specify the nature of the accidents or who was killed. But the alleged accidents apparently gave him the idea for a “funny” prank.

“I had an old bike in my car that somebody had asked me to get rid of” – recall, it was a van, or so the story goes – “and I said, ‘let’s go put the bear in Central Park and we’ll make it look like he got hit by a bike! It’ll be funny for people.’ So we went and did that, and we thought it would be amusing for whomever found it or something.”

Kennedy would have been 60-years-old.

Although fascinating, the discovery of the bear cub was not amusing, according to contemporary accounts, and the incident was investigated as an apparent case of animal cruelty. One report even says the cub had “stab and slash wounds.”

Patch was unable to locate an account of the incident that describes the death of the cub as resulting from a possible collision with a bicycle.

"What Did I Do?"

In the video, Kennedy seems to be aware that New Yorkers weren’t as amused by the prank as he might've thought.

“The next day it was on every television station, it was the front page of every paper, and I turned on the TV and there was like a mile of yellow tape and twenty cop cars, helicopters flying over it, and I was like, ‘oh my god, what did I do?’”

Kennedy even appears to acknowledge some risk of legal exposure.

“I was worried because my prints were all over that bike,” he says, in the video. “Luckily, the story died down after awhile and it stayed dead for a decade…The New Yorker somehow found out about it, and they’re gonna do a big article on me.” .

The magazine published a major story about Kennedy and his campaign on Monday, which features a photo of the presidential candidate posing with the dead cub.

Robert F. Kennedy, father of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was attorney general, and represented New York State in the Senate. He was assassinated during his 1968 campaign for president.

“You know it’s gonna be a bad story,” Kennedy Jr. said.

“Uh oh,” Barr replies.

The video Kennedy Jr. posted to X is captioned, “Looking forward to seeing how you spin this one, @NewYorker…”

It’s the second bizarre incident involving animal violence in this year’s presidential election, following Trump VP contender, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, detailing in a book how she shot a difficult dog, Cricket – and indicating that she believes President Biden’s dog, Commander, should suffer a similar fate.

Although black bears are in New York State and New Jersey, there are no bears in Central Park, and a bear found in New York City would typically imply an escaped exotic pet or zoo animal.

The cub was found by the park’s Seventh Regiment Memorial, near 69th Street and Central Park West.

Upper West Side resident Florence Slatkin, the woman who found the bear, has not yet responded to a request for comment.