Anika Begay
Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. makes a campaign announcement at a press conference in Philadelphia on October 9, 2023.
Photo by Jessica Kourkounis/Getty Images
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Photo by Jessica Kourkounis/Getty Images
In an election season full of surprises, one might add this week’s revelation from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The independent presidential candidate claims that 10 years ago he picked up the carcass of a dead bear cub along a rural highway and later smuggled it into New York’s Central Park to make it look like the bear had been hit by a cyclist.
In a video posted confessing his old act, Kennedy said: “I pulled over, grabbed the bear and put it in the back of my truck, because I was going to skin it… I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator.”
Kennedy also posed for a photo with the dead bear. He grimaces as if he’s being bitten.
Kennedy says he had dinner in New York and so he drove to the restaurant with the cub’s body in his car. During dinner he remembered he had a flight later that night. Some nights you might go out to dinner and wonder if you left a hallway light on, and other nights you wonder what you’re going to do with a bear corpse in the back of your car when you have a late-night flight to catch.
Kennedy said he and some friends, who he said had been drinking but he hadn’t, took the bear’s remains to Central Park and left them there, along with an old bicycle that was always in his car.
Two women discovered the cub the next morning. To quote the New York Post on October 6, 2014, “A bear cub was found dead in Central Park on Monday, and police believe it was likely ‘murdered.'”
A subsequent forensic investigation found that the bear cub was 6 months old, female, and weighed 44 pounds.
Kennedy says in the video that he thought staging the scene would have been “fun.”
Kennedy and his friends dragged the body of a dead bear cub to Central Park and watched news reports for the next few days as police and forensic experts scrambled to investigate its death.
Some citizens were alarmed that bears might be coming to Central Park. Many others seemed touched by the plight of an innocent bear cub who had been run over somewhere and dragged posthumously in a human prank. I wonder what the hoaxers found so funny about diverting so many public servants and officials from the real work they need to do in trying to investigate real crimes.
