This story contains graphic images.
On August 4, 2024, when the current US Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was still a presidential candidate, he job a video on
At the time, Kennedy said he was trying to anticipate a story The New Yorker was about to post which mentioned the incident. But by telling the truth, Kennedy solved a decade-old problem. New York City Mystery: How and why was a young black bear – a wild animal native to the state, but not to modern-day Manhattan – found dead under a bush near West 69th Street in Central Park?
WIRED obtained documents shedding new light on the incident from the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation through a public records request. The documents, which include never-before-seen photos of the bear, resurface questions about the bizarre choices Kennedy says he made that left city workers dealing with the consequences and lamenting the bear’s short life and grim fate.
A representative for Kennedy did not respond to comment. The New York Police Department (NYPD) and Parks Department referred WIRED to the New York Department of Environmental Conservation. NYDEC spokesperson Jeff Wernick told WIRED that its investigation into the cub’s death was closed in late 2014 “due to a lack of sufficient evidence” to determine whether state law had been violated. They added that New York’s Environmental Conservation Law prohibits “unlawful possession of a bear without a tag or permit and unlawful removal of a bear” and that “the statute of limitations for these offenses is one year.”
The first in a series of emails between local authorities 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 of the Urban Park Rangers, told two colleagues that UPR Sergeant Eric Handy had recently called her about a “dead black bear” found in Central Park.
“The NYPD told him they would treat this as a crime scene, so he couldn’t get too close to it,” McGuire wrote. “I asked him to take photos, send them and let us know.”
“Poor little guy!” McGuire wrote in a separate email later that morning.
According to emails obtained by WIRED, Handy briefed several colleagues throughout the day, noting that the Department of Environmental Conservation had arrived on scene and that the agency planned 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 American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. (This did not happen, because NYDEC took the bear to a state laboratory near Albany.)
Images of the bear have already been made public – local news pictures from October 2014 seems to show it from afar. However, documents obtained by WIRED show never-before-seen footage taken by investigators of the bear at the scene, which Handy sent as attachments in emails to McGuire. The bear is seen lying on its side in an unnatural position. Its head sticks out from under a bush and rests next to a small patch of grass. Pieces of flesh are visible through the bear’s black fur, covered with a few brown leaves.
Courtesy of NYC Parks
A report attributed to Handy and his partner, identified as “A. Ioannidis,” notes that the bear “sustained multiple injuries to its body, hind legs and jaw.”
“A closer inspection of [the] The time appears to indicate that the bear was hit by a car,” read the notes obtained by WIRED, which appear to have been handwritten at 4 p.m. on October 6, although it is unclear by whom.
Handy also contacted Caroline Greenleaf, the Central Park Conservancy’s director of community relations, who had alerted UPR about the bear on October 6. “Thanks for letting us know about the bear!” Handy wrote in an email at 5:52 p.m. “Definitely a first for Central Park.”
“Quite a strange day,” replied Greenleaf. “I will be very interested to know the results of the autopsy.” Handy agreed in his response the next morning, saying the day before was “really strange.”
A NYDEC law enforcement complaint summary obtained by WIRED describes analysis of the bear’s body conducted the next day by the agency’s wildlife health biologist, Kevin Hynes.
“Mr. Hynes stated that the cause of death of the less than one year old female cub was massive blunt force trauma consistent with a motor vehicle collision,” the report states. “The injuries included spinal fractures, all broken legs, and skull fractures severe enough that the majority of his brain was lost through his mouth.”
This is consistent with the preliminary forensic autopsy report that Hynes ultimately produced for NYDEC, which WIRED obtained through a public records request. The report – which Business Insider covered in 2024 — recontextualizes a photo included in the New Yorker 2024 history in which Kennedy is shown putting his hand in the mouth of the deceased bear cub. As Business Insider reported, the autopsy indicates that in addition to the brain tissue found in the bear’s mouth, it was also in her “trachea and upper bronchi.” He also notes that “the remaining brain tissue is scrambled, liquefied and hemorrhagic.”
The autopsy also reveals that the calf only lived seven to eight months and that it was a female. A Department of Environmental Conservation report obtained by WIRED states that she “was in good health and was eating [natural] food sources” before death.
Based on Hynes’ analysis of the physical evidence and the known range of its species, the NYDEC report hypothesizes that the bear was struck and killed by a car, “possibly along the lower portion of NYS Thruway 87, around the New York-New Jersey border, around Rockland or Orange County.”
Courtesy of New York State Department of Environmental Conservation
At this point, it’s worth examining what precisely Kennedy said about the incident in his August 2024 video, in which he speaks with, for some reason, Roseanne Barr.
“I was taking a group of people hunting in Goshen, New York, in the Hudson Valley,” Kennedy says. (Goshen is in Orange County, New York, home to a bear population that Hynes said the cub might have belonged to.) “And then a woman in a pickup truck in front of me hit a bear and killed it.”
Kennedy claims he put the bear in his pickup truck with the intention of “skinning her” and “putting the meat in my refrigerator” because she was “in very good condition.”
“And you can do it in New York State; you can get a bear tag for a road-killed bear,” Kennedy adds.
He and his friends had a wonderful time falcon hunting, Kennedy said, and the day wore on. Eventually, he found himself running for a trip “back into town” to dine at the Peter Luger Steak House – likely the original location in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, rather than the one on Long Island – and decided he didn’t have enough time to drop the bear off at his home in Westchester, New York. So the bear came (apparently) to Brooklyn. But when Kennedy’s dinner also lasted a long time, he realized he had to get to the airport.
“I wasn’t drinking, of course, but people were drinking with me and thought it was a good idea,” Kennedy says, insisting for the second time that he was breaking absolutely no laws that day. “I had an old bike in my car that someone asked me to get rid of. I said, ‘Let’s put the bear in Central Park, and we’ll pretend it was hit by a bike.'” It would be fun, funny for people. He explains that there was “a series” of fatal bike accidents around that time – there were two in the last few months – that inspired the idea.
In the video, Kennedy claims 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 don’t live in Central Park outside of its zoo — and had prompted a major response from law enforcement. What made Kennedy particularly anxious, he claims, was a news report that the bike was being sent to a forensic lab to be fingerprinted.
As Hell’s Gate summed up shortly after Kennedy’s video was posted, “??????????”
Despite the new documents that WIRED is able to release, questions remain about the decisions Kennedy made on that day in 2014. Let’s review the timeline: The bear was discovered on the morning of Monday, October 6, 2014. If Kennedy had actually disposed of the bear the night before, it would have been Sunday, October 5, 2014.
Kennedy claims to have found the bear in the Hudson Valley area, on a road approaching Goshen, New York. A stop in Westchester en route to Peter Luger would have added about 35-70 minutes to the trip. Perhaps, even if he met friends familiar with his alleged love of animal carcasses (his daughter once claimed he decapitated a dead whale with a chainsaw, strapped its head to the top of his minivan and took it home, although a later investigation by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said his claim was “unfounded”), he was allegedly unacceptably late. But why couldn’t Kennedy have just abandoned his mission to skin and slaughter this baby bear by placing him in a wooded area anywhere between Goshen and New York, especially knowing he had a flight later? Only one man knows the answer.
We also don’t know why Kennedy chose the specific location where he placed the child’s body. If he was driving to one of the three airports closest to Peter Luger, it would be strange, because there is no direct route to any of them that comes even remotely close to West 69th Street. Does this mean that Kennedy drove 20-40 minutes to drop off the bear and then completely changed direction to drive 22-65 minutes to one of these airports? Alternatively, Kennedy could have flown to the Westchester County Airport. In this scenario, dumping the bear where he did in Central Park would have added about 45 minutes to his trip. The problem here is that Kennedy lived only 15 minutes from this airport at the time, which means it would have been necessary less it would be time for him to arrive at the airport if he had just brought the bear home.
Moreover, the Was Brooklyn’s Prospect Park ever considered? Why couldn’t he have just contacted city or state officials if he intended not to keep the bear?
We may not have the answers to any of these questions, but we can say one thing with certainty: Kennedy planned to skin that baby black bear and store its meat in his refrigerator, then decided he didn’t have time and disposed of her under a bush. This left encouraged officials to treat his body with respect and determine what could have happened to him. Unfortunately, for a bear whose life was cut far too short, this was perhaps the best possible outcome.
Updated: 01/07/2025, 12:35 p.m. EDT: WIRED has corrected a reference to a bear sighting in Prospect Park in Brooklyn.