Father throws three-year-old son to his death, then leaps himself

NEW YORK — A father threw his young child off the roof of a 52-storey Manhattan apartment building in a murder-suicide on the first day he was allowed to be alone with the boy amid an ugly custody battle with the mother, police officials said Monday.

“There was a history of domestic turmoil,” police commissioner Raymond Kelly said.

Dmitriy Kanarikov picked up his three-year-old son at 10 a.m. Sunday at a Manhattan police station — a neutral site negotiated in advance by the parents — to spend time with him for the first time “outside of some sort of institutional setting,” Kelly said.

“He picked up the son and we all know now tragically he went to a building (and) took the son to the roof,” Kelly said. “All indications are he threw him off and that’s when he jumped himself.”

Officers responding to an emergency call reporting two jumpers from a building on the Upper West Side around noon Sunday found Kanarikov, 35, of Brooklyn, and the boy on the lower rooftops of two nearby buildings.

The man was pronounced dead at the scene and his son, Kirill Kanarikov, was pronounced dead at a hospital, police said. A witness said the boy was wearing Christmas pyjamas.

The motive behind the tragedy remained murky on Monday. Kelly said there was no note found, and investigators have no evidence Kanarikov ever threatened to harm his son. However, at one point, he had told his wife that “unless she signed over the house to him and some undisclosed property, he was going to take the child,” Kelly said.

Kanarikov and his wife married in 2009 and lived in Brooklyn, where their son was born a year later. They separated last year, and the mother and son moved to New Jersey and got an order of protection.