Robert Kennedy Jr. has finally admitted he was involved in the shocking discovery of a bear found dead in Central Park a decade ago.
The bear was found in the New York park in October 2014 by a dog walker who then notified a Central Park Conservancy worker who contacted police.
An investigation by the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) concluded that the six-month-old bear was run over and killed by a vehicle, but they could not figure out how it ended up in the park.
In a video with comedian Roseanne Barr, Kennedy now claims he was there when the bear died and said he was responsible for it being located in Central Park.
‘A woman in the van in front of me hit a bear and killed it, a young bear,’ he recalled. ‘So I pulled over, and I picked up the bear and put him in the back of my van because I was going to skin the bear, and it was in very good condition, and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator.
‘You can do that in New York state. You can get a bear tag for roadkill bear,’ he said.
The 70-year-old presidential candidate said he then proceeded to go hawking with the dead bear in his car.
He said they were catching a lot of game and stayed late, so instead of heading home to Westchester, NY he had to go straight to New York City for a dinner.
But then the dinner also went late, and according to Kennedy, he needed to go to the airport instead of his home.
‘The bear was in my car, and I didn’t want to leave the bear in the car because that would have been bad,’ Kennedy said.
Kennedy said there was ‘a little bit of the redneck in me’ when he explained there had been a series of bicycle accidents in the city and multiple people had gotten killed or badly injured.
Kennedy recalled it was in the press every day and that he also had an old bike in his car someone asked him to get rid of.
‘I said let’s go put the bear in Central Park, and we’ll make it look like it got hit by a bike,’ Kennedy said as he and Barr laughed. ‘So everybody thought that’s a great idea.’
Kennedy said he had not been drinking when the decision was made but others had been.
A dead bear was discovered in Central Park in 2014. An investigation determined the six-month-old bear had been killed by a vehicle and left in the park
Kennedy claims in video he was behind the dead bear found in Central Park a decade ago. The presidential candidate said he picked it up of the road and was going to skin it and put the meat in his fridge
Kennedy is telling the story of the dead bear in the video to actress Roseanne Barr
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It appeared Kennedy was attempting to the story now because he is trying to get ahead of an article by the New Yorker.
When he posted the video of him telling the story he used the caption tagging the New Yorker: ‘Looking forward to seeing how you spin this one.’
DailyMail.com reached out to the Kennedy campaign for comment.
Kennedy said in his video that the next day after leaving the dead bear in the park, it was on every television station and in every paper.
‘I turned on the TV and it was like, mile of yellow tape, and there were 20 cop cars. There were helicopters flying over it,’ Kennedy said. ‘I was like “oh my god. What did I do?”‘
Kennedy said he was worried because his prints were all over the bike. But Kennedy said the story died after a while and ‘it stayed dead for a decade.’
He said the New Yorker somehow found out about it and were going to do a big article on him.
‘It’s going to be a bad article,’ Kennedy said.
At the time, the DEC was investigating potential law violations. If caught, a person could face charges including illegal possession to disposing of an untagged bear.