This story contains graphic imagery.

On August 4, 2024, when now-US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was still a presidential candidate, he posted a video on X in which he admitted to dumping a dead bear cub near an old bicycle in Central Park 10 years prior, in a mystifying attempt to make the young bears premature death look like a cyclists hit and run.

At the time, Kennedy said he was trying to get ahead of a story The New Yorker was about to publish that mentioned the incident. But in coming clean, Kennedy solved a decade-old New York City mystery: How and why had a young black beara wild animal native to the state, but not to modern-era Manhattanbeen found dead under a bush near West 69th Street in Central Park?

WIRED has obtained documents that shed new light on the incident from the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation via a public records request. The documentswhich include previously unseen photos of the bear cubresurface questions about the bizarre choices Kennedy says he made, which left city employees dealing with the aftermath and lamenting the cubs short life and grim fate.

A representative for Kennedy did not respond for comment. The New York Police Department (NYPD) and the Parks Department referred WIRED to the New York Department of Environmental Conservation. NYDEC spokesperson Jeff Wernick tells WIRED that its investigation into the death of the bear cub was closed in late 2014 due to a lack of sufficient evidence to determine whether state law had been violated. They added that New Yorks environmental conservation law forbids illegal possession of a bear without a tag or permit and illegal disposal of a bear and that the statute of limitations for these offenses is one year.

The first of a number of emails between local officials coordinating the handling of the baby bears remains was sent at 10:16 am on October 6, 2014. Bonnie McGuire, then-deputy director at Urban Park Rangers, told two colleagues that UPR sergeant Eric Handy had recently called her about a dead black bear found in Central Park.

NYPD told him they will treat it like a crime scene, so he cant get too close, McGuire wrote. Ive asked him to take pictures and send them over and to keep us posted.

Poor little guy! McGuire wrote in a separate email later that morning.

According to emails obtained by WIRED, Handy updated several colleagues throughout the day, noting that the Department of Environmental Conservation had arrived on scene and that the agency was planning to coordinate with the NYPD to transfer the body to the Bronx Zoo, where it would be inspected by the NYPDs animal cruelty unit and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. (This didnt end up happening, as NYDEC took the bear to a state lab near Albany.)

Imagery of the bear has been public beforelocal news footage from October 2014 appears to show it from a distance. However, the documents WIRED obtained show previously unpublished images that investigators took of the bear on the scene, which Handy sent as attachments in emails to McGuire. The bear is seen laying on its side in an unnatural position. Its head protrudes from under a bush and rests next to a small patch of grass. Bits of flesh are visible through the bears black fur, which was covered in a few brown leaves.