At this point, it’s worth checking out what exactly Kennedy said about the incident in his August 2024 video where he’s talking to Roseanne Barr for some reason.
“I was taking a group of people coming to Goshen, New York, into the Hudson Valley,” Kennedy says. (Goshen is in Orange County, Fresh York, home to a population of bears that Hynes said the cub may have belonged to). “And then the woman in the van in front of me hit the bear and killed it.”
Kennedy claims he placed the bear in his van, planning to “skin the bear” and “put the meat in the refrigerator” because it was in “very good condition.”
“You can do it in New York state; you can get a tag for a roadkill bear,” Kennedy adds.
Kennedy says he and his friends were having a great time falconry when the day got tardy. He eventually found himself falling behind and took a trip “back to town” for dinner at the Peter Luger Steak House – presumably the original location in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, not Long Island – and decided he didn’t have enough time to drop the bear off at his home in Westchester, Fresh York. So the bear has come to (apparently) Brooklyn. But when Kennedy’s dinner was also running long, he realized he had to go to the airport.
In the recording, Kennedy claims he was surprised to wake up the next morning to discover that the story of the dead baby black bear in Central Park was substantial news – again, bears are dead in Central Park outside the zoo – and prompted a mighty law enforcement response. Kennedy was particularly concerned, he says, by a news report that the bike had been sent to a crime lab for fingerprinting.
How Hell’s Gate concluded shortly after Kennedy’s video was released: “?????????”
Despite the up-to-date documents WIRED is able to release, questions remain about the decisions Kennedy made that day in 2014. Let’s look at the chronology: 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 says he found the bear in the Hudson Valley area, off the road to Goshen, Fresh York. Stopping in Westchester on the way to Peter Luger would add approximately 35-70 minutes to the trip. Perhaps, even if he met friends familiar with his alleged love of animal carcasses (his daughter once claimed that he cut dead whale with a chainsaw, tied its head to the roof of his minivan and brought it home, although a subsequent National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration investigation found that its claim was “unfounded”), would have been unacceptably tardy. But why couldn’t Kennedy just abandon his mission to skin and kill the little bear, placing it in a wooded area between Goshen and Fresh York, especially knowing he had a flight later? Only one man knows the answer.