At this point, it’s useful to check what Kennedy actually said about the incident in his August 2024 video, in which he is talking to Roseanne Barr for some reason.
“I was taking a group of people to the Hudson Valley in Goshen, New York,” says Kennedy. (Goshen is in Orange County, New York, where there is a population of bears, and Hines speculated that the cub may have belonged to him.) “And then a woman in a van in front of me hit a bear and killed it.”
Kennedy claims he kept the bear in his van with the plan of “skinning the bear” and “putting the meat in my refrigerator”, as it was in “pretty good shape”.
“And you can do that in New York state; you can get a bear tag for a roadkill bear,” Kennedy says.
Kennedy says he and his friends had a great time hawking and it got late into the day. Eventually, he found himself scrambling for a trip “back into town” for dinner at Peter Luger Steak House — presumably the original location in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, not its Long Island location — and decided he didn’t have enough time to drop off the bear at his Westchester, New York, home. So the bear (apparently) came to Brooklyn. But when Kennedy’s dinner lasted too long, he realized that he would have to go to the airport.
“Of course, I wasn’t drinking, but I was drinking with people who thought it was a good idea,” says Kennedy. He insisted a second time that he was breaking no laws at all 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 make it look like he got hit by a bike.’ “It will be fun, funny for people.” He explains that there were “a series” of fatal bicycle accidents around that time – two in recent months – which 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 a big news story – again, bears don’t live in Central Park outside of their zoo – and had prompted a major law enforcement response. He claims that what particularly concerned Kennedy was a news report stating that the bike was being sent to a forensic lab for fingerprinting.
As Hellgate summarized shortly after Kennedy’s video was posted, “????????????????”
Despite WIRED being able to uncover new documents, questions remain about the decisions Kennedy made that day in 2014. Let’s review the timeline: The bear was discovered on the morning of Monday, October 6, 2014. If Kennedy had indeed disposed of the bear the night before, it would have been Sunday, October 5, 2014.
Kennedy claims he found the bear in the Hudson Valley area on the road toward Goshen, New York. A stop in Westchester en route to Peter Luger would have added approximately 35 to 70 minutes to the trip. Perhaps, even if he had been meeting friends familiar with his alleged love of animal carcasses (his daughter once alleged that he had chopped up a dead whale with a chainsaw, strapped its head to the top of his minivan, and brought it home, although a subsequent National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration investigation said his claim was “unfounded”), he would have been unacceptably late. But why couldn’t Kennedy abandon his mission of skinning and slaughtering this bear cub by placing it in a wooded area somewhere between Goshen and New York City, especially knowing that he had to fly out afterward? Only one person knows the answer.
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