This story contains graphic imagery.
On August 4, 2024, when now-US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was still a presidential candidate, he posted a video on X in which he admitted to dumping a dead bear cub near an old bicycle in Central Park 10 years prior, in a mystifying attempt to make the young bear’s premature death look like a cyclist’s hit and run.
At the time, Kennedy said he was trying to get ahead of a story The New Yorker was about to publish that mentioned the incident. But in coming clean, Kennedy solved a decade-old New York City mystery: How and why had a young black bear—a wild animal native to the state, but not to modern-era Manhattan—been found dead under a bush near West 69th Street in Central Park?
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WIRED has obtained documents that shed new light on the incident from the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation via a public records request. The documents—which include previously unseen photos of the bear cub—resurface questions about the bizarre choices Kennedy says he made, which left city employees dealing with the aftermath and lamenting the cub’s short life and grim fate.
A representative for Kennedy did not respond for comment. The New York Police Department (NYPD) and the Parks Department referred WIRED to the New York Department of Environmental Conservation (NYDEC). NYDEC spokesperson Jeff Wernick tells WIRED that its investigation into the death of the bear cub was closed in late 2014 “due to a lack of sufficient evidence” to determine if state law was violated. They added that New York’s environmental conservation law forbids “illegal possession of a bear without a tag or permit and illegal disposal of a bear,” and that “the statute of limitations for these offenses is one year.”
The first of a number of emails between local officials coordinating the handling of the baby bear’s remains was sent at 10:16 a.m. on October 6, 2014. Bonnie McGuire, then-deputy director at Urban Park Rangers (UPR), told two colleagues that UPR sergeant Eric Handy had recently called her about a “dead black bear” found in Central Park.
“NYPD told him they will treat it like a crime scene so he can’t get too close,” McGuire wrote. “I’ve asked him to take pictures and send them over and to keep us posted.”
“Poor little guy!” McGuire wrote in a separate email later that morning.
According to emails obtained by WIRED, Handy updated several colleagues throughout the day, noting that the NYDEC had arrived on scene, and that the agency was planning to coordinate with the NYPD to transfer the body to the Bronx Zoo, where it would be inspected by the NYPD’s animal cruelty unit and the ASPCA. (This didn’t end up happening, as the NYDEC took the bear to a state lab near Albany.)
Imagery of the bear has been public before—local news footage from October 2014 appears to show it from a distance. However, the documents WIRED obtained show previously unpublished images that investigators took of the bear on the scene, which Handy sent as attachments in emails to McGuire. The bear is seen laying on its side in an unnatural position. Its head protrudes from under a bush and rests next to a small patch of grass. Bits of flesh are visible through the bear’s black fur, which was covered in a few brown leaves.
A report attributed to Handy and his partner, identified as “A. Ioannidis,” notes that the bear “had multiple injuries to its body, rear legs, and jaw.”
“Further inspection of [the] hour seems to indicate bear was hit by a car,” read notes obtained by WIRED, which appear to have been handwritten at 4 pm on October 6, though it’s unclear by whom.
Handy also communicated with Caroline Greenleaf—the director of community relations for the Central Park Conservancy, which had tipped UPR off about the bear—on October 6. “Thanks for letting us know about the bear!” Handy wrote in a 5:52 pm email. “Definitely a first for Central Park.”
“All around strange day,” Greenleaf replied. “I will be very interested in hearing the necropsy results.” Handy agreed in his reply the next morning, saying the previous day was “definitely strange.”
A NYDEC law enforcement complaint summary obtained by WIRED describes the analysis of the bear’s body conducted the next day by agency wildlife health biologist Kevin Hynes.
“Mr. Hynes stated the cause of death to the less than one-year-old female bear cub was massive blunt force trauma consistent with a motor vehicle strike,” the report reads. “Injuries included spinal fractures, all legs broken, and skull fractures severe enough for the majority of its brain to be lost through its mouth.”
This is consistent with the preliminary forensic necropsy report Hynes eventually produced for the NYDEC, which WIRED obtained via a public records request. The report—which Business Insider covered in 2024—recontextualizes a photo included in the 2024 New Yorker story in which Kennedy is shown sticking his hand inside the mouth of the deceased bear cub. As reported by Business Insider, the necropsy notes that in addition to brain tissue being found in the bear’s mouth, it was also in her “trachea and upper bronchus.” It also notes that “the remaining brain tissue is scrambled, liquefied, and hemorrhagic.”
The necropsy also reveals that the cub lived just seven to eight months, and that it was female. A DEC report obtained by WIRED notes that she “was healthy and eating [natural] sources of food” prior to death.
Based on Hynes’ analysis of the physical evidence and the known range of her species, the NYDEC report hypothesizes that the bear was struck and killed by a car, “possibly along the lower Route 87 portion of the NYS Thruway around the NY/NJ border around Rockland or Orange County.”
At this point, it’s useful to examine what precisely Kennedy said about the incident in his August 2024 video, in which he is speaking with, for some reason, Roseanne Barr.
“I was taking a group of people falconing up in Goshen, New York up in the Hudson Valley,” Kennedy says. (Goshen is in Orange County, NY, home to a bear population that Hynes theorized the cub may have belonged to.) “And then a woman in a van in front of me hit a bear and killed it.”
Kennedy claims that he put the bear in his van with a plan to “skin the bear” and “put the meat in my refrigerator” because she was in “very good condition.”
“And you can do that in New York State, you can get a bear tag for a roadkill bear,” Kennedy adds.
He and his friends had a wonderful time falconing, Kennedy says, and the day grew late. Eventually, he found himself running behind for a trip “right back to the city” for dinner at Peter Luger Steak House—presumably the original location in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, rather than its Long Island location—and decided he didn’t have enough time to drop off the bear at his Westchester, NY home. So, the bear came to (apparently) Brooklyn. But when Kennedy’s dinner also ran long, he realized he had to go to the airport.
“I wasn’t drinking, of course, but people were drinking with me who thought this was a good idea,” Kennedy says, insisting for the second time that he was absolutely not breaking any laws that day. “I had an old bike in my car that somebody had asked me to get rid of. 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’d be fun, funny for people.” He explains that there had been “a series” of fatal bicycle accidents around that time—there had been two in recent months—which inspired the idea.
In the video, Kennedy claims that he was surprised to wake up the next morning and find that the story of a dead baby black bear in Central Park was big news—again, bears do not live in Central Park outside of its zoo—and had prompted a major law enforcement response. What made Kennedy especially anxious, he claims, was a news report that claimed the bike was being sent to a forensic lab for fingerprinting.
As HellGate summarized shortly after Kennedy’s video was posted, “???????????”
Despite the new documents that WIRED is able to disclose, there are lingering questions about the decisions Kennedy made that day in 2014. Let’s review the timeline: The bear was discovered on the morning of Monday, October 6, 2014. If Kennedy indeed disposed of the bear the night before, that would have been Sunday, October 5, 2014.
Kennedy claims that he found the bear in the Hudson Valley area on a road approaching Goshen, NY. Stopping in Westchester on his way to Peter Luger would have added about 35 to 70 minutes to the trip. Perhaps, even if he was meeting friends familiar with his purported love for animal carcasses (his daughter once alleged he decapitated a dead whale with a chainsaw, strapped its head to the top of his minivan, and brought it home, though a subsequent NOAA investigation said her claim was “unfounded”), he would’ve been unacceptably late. But why couldn’t Kennedy have just abandoned his mission to skin and butcher this baby bear by placing it in a wooded area anywhere between Goshen and New York City, especially knowing that he had a flight later? Only one man knows the answer.
It’s also unclear why Kennedy chose the specific location he did to dump the cub’s body. If he was driving to one of the three airports closest to Peter Luger, that would be strange, because there is no direct route to any of them that comes remotely close to West 69th Street. Does this mean Kennedy drove 20 to 40 minutes out of the way to drop off the bear, then completely changed direction to drive 22 to 65 minutes to one of those airports? Alternatively, Kennedy could’ve been going to Westchester County Airport. In this scenario, dumping the bear where he did in Central Park would’ve added about 45 minutes to his trip. The problem here is that Kennedy lived just 15 minutes from this airport at the time, meaning it would’ve taken less time for him to get to the airport if he had just brought the bear to his home.
For that matter, was Brooklyn’s Prospect Park—where bear sightings, though rare, have happened—ever considered? Why couldn’t he have simply gotten in touch with city or state authorities if he was intent on not keeping the bear?
We may not have the answers to any of these questions, but we can say one thing for certain: Kennedy planned to skin this baby black bear and store her meat in his refrigerator, then decided he didn’t have time, and disposed of her under a bush. This left concerned public servants to treat her body with respect and determine what may have happened to her. Unfortunately, for a bear whose life was cut far too short, maybe that was the best possible outcome.
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