WILMINGTON, Del. — Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an independent candidate for president, once found a bear that had been hit by a car and left it in New York’s Central Park with a bicycle on top of it. This caused a mystery that swept the city ten years ago.
Kennedy talks about what happened in a video that was shared on social media on Sunday. He also says that it will be part of an upcoming article in The New Yorker that he thinks will be negative.
It’s the latest strange event in Kennedy’s crazy campaign, which has split his famous family and made both Republicans and Democrats worry about how he might affect the election for president. Kennedy has said that he had a parasite in his brain that killed it. A friend sent Vanity Fair magazine a picture of Kennedy tensely preparing to take a bite of a charred animal. Kennedy denied eating a dog and said it was a goat.
Kennedy tells the story to actress Roseanne Barr in the video. He says he was on his way to a falconry trip with friends when the woman in front of him hit and killed the young bear with her car. He put it in his own car and meant to skin it and eat the meat, but the day got away from him.
He says that he was in Manhattan at some point and had to get the dead bear out of his car. He said that the Central Park plan was made up by his drunk friends as a joke, but he wasn’t drunk himself. Since bicycle accidents were getting a lot of attention at the time, Kennedy and his friends thought it would be funny to make it look like a bike hit the bear.
Two women walking their dogs found the dead bear and called the police. This started a mystery that kept people in the city guessing for a few days. There are no bears in the park that are known to live there.
Police checked the bike for prints and sent the animal to Albany for an autopsy. The autopsy showed that the bear was probably hit by a car and was not a victim of animal cruelty. It was still unknown how the bear got to Central Park.
In the video, Kennedy tells Barr, “I was scared because my prints were all over that bike.”
