WILMINGTON, Del. Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He once recovered a bear that was killed by a motorist and left it in New York’s Central Park with a bicycle on top, sparking a mystery that consumed the city a decade ago.
Kennedy describes the incident in a video posted to social media on Sunday, adding that it will be included in an upcoming New Yorker article that he expects to be damaging.
It’s the latest bizarre incident in Kennedy’s quixotic campaign, which has divided his famous family and left Republicans and Democrats concerned about his potential impact on the presidential race. Kennedy recognized a parasite that lodged in his brain and died. He denied eating a dog after a friend shared a photo with Vanity Fair magazine showing Kennedy dramatically preparing to take a bite of a charred animal; Kennedy said it was a goat.
In the video, Kennedy tells the story to actress Roseanne Barr. He says he was heading to a falconry excursion with friends when a woman driving in front of him hit and killed the young bear with her vehicle. He says he put it in his own vehicle, intending to skin it and eat the meat, but the day got away from him.
Eventually, he says, he was in Manhattan and needed to get the bear carcass out of his vehicle. Alcohol-fueled friends of his came up with the Central Park plan as a joke, he said, adding that he himself was not drunk. At the time, bicycle accidents were receiving significant media attention, so Kennedy and his friends thought it would be funny to make it look like the bear was hit by a bicycle.
Two women walking their dogs I found the dead bear and alerted the authorities, triggering a mystery that captivated the city for a few days. Bears are not among the park’s known wildlife population.
The bike was dusted for fingerprints and the animal was sent to Albany for a necropsy, which determined the bear was probably hit by a vehicle and was not a victim of animal cruelty. But how the bear ended up in Central Park remained a mystery.
“I was worried because my fingerprints were all over that bike,” Kennedy told Barr in the video.
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