No charges likely for RFK Jr. after he confesses to dumping bear in Central Park in 2014
CENTRAL PARK (WABC) -- No charges will be filed against Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after he confessed this weekend to leaving a bear carcass in Central Park nearly a decade ago.
However, the statute of limitations for such offenses is only one year, officials say.
The bear was found in the park October of 2014 and the origins of how it go there quickly became a New York City mystery. 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.
WATCH | Eyewitness News coverage of dead bear cub found in Central Park (2014)
But on Sunday, almost 10 years after that October day in 2014... RFK Jr. offered an answer.
The independent candidate posted a video to X 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 went 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 keep the meat in his refrigerator.
However, time got away from him that day. After dinner back in the city with friends went late, he told Barr, he realized it the carcass might start to go bad, so 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, Florence Slatkin found the bear and bike in the morning and described it to Eyewitness News back in 2014.
"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," Slatkin said in 2014.
On Monday, she spoke to Eyewitness News again and said she never thought she'd be talking about the bizarre discovery again, but she does wonder who really hit and killed the bear.
Police searched for answers back then, but the case soon went cold.
So why come clean about it now? Kennedy said the New Yorker was writing an article about his political career that was going to touch on the incident.
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 told ABC News that he is not worried about any legal ramifications.
The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation led the 2014 investigation and said it was determined the bear died of blunt-force trauma consistent with a high-speed collision and the investigation was closed later that year due to a lack of sufficient evidence to determine if violations occurred.
"The State's Environmental Conservation Law includes offenses such as illegal possession of a bear without a tag or permit and illegal disposal of a bear, both of which are violation-level offenses typically subject to fines of up to $250 for the first offense," the department said in a statement. "The statute of limitations for these offenses is one year; charges cannot be brought for incidents that occurred more than one year ago."
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