Mystery Solved: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claims he dumped bear carcass in Central Park
CENTRAL PARK (WABC) -- A nearly-decade-old New York City mystery may have been solved.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claims it was he who dumped the carcass of a bear cub in Central Park in 2014.
WATCH | Eyewitness News coverage of dead bear cub found in Central Park (2014)
The next day, it was on every television station and it was the front page of every paper - after all, dead bears don't just turn up in Central Park.
On Sunday, almost 10 years after that October day in 2014... RFK Jr. is offering an answer.
The independent candidate posted a video to X tonight explaining that on a 'falconing trip' to Goshen in the Hudson Valley, 'a woman in a van in front of me hit a bear and killed it. A young bear.'
He goes on to confess to a speechless and incredulous-looking Roseanne Barr that he scooped up the roadkill and put it in his truck, hoping to skin it.
"And I was gonna put the meat in my refrigerator. And you can do that in New York State. You can get a bear tag for a roadkill bear," he added.
However, time got away from him that day. After dinner back in the city with friends went late, he tells Barr, he realized it the carcass might start to go bad, so of course he and his pals looked for the next best thing to do with it in the city - and that was to stage an accident.
"I had an old bike in my car that someone had asked me to get rid of, and I said let's put the bear in Central Park and make it look like he got hit by a bike."
Sure enough, somebody found the bear and bike in the morning and described it to Eyewitness News.
"We looked closer we saw something under the back wheel, it could have been a raccoon, I didn't know what it was, but then I thought it was the head of a big dog, that was obviously dead," said the witness.
Police were dusting that bicycle for fingerprints. Neither police nor a state lab would make a connection to Kennedy or anyone else and the case went cold.
So why come clean about it now? Perhaps one of his friends let the cat- or bear- out of the bag.
"The New Yorker found out about it and they're going to do a big article on me," Kennedy said.
Much like he claims he scooped that bear, he now claims he wanted to scoop the magazine by posting that recent conversation publicly to acknowledge he does in fact bear responsibility for the incident. His campaign tells ABC News that he is not worried about any legal ramifications.
Eyewitness News has reached out to the NYPD to ask if there might be any. The Parks Department is also deferring any questions about the incident to the NYPD.
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