Father throws son, 3, to his death

NEW YORK — A father threw his young child off the roof of a 52-storey Manhattan apartment 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.

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

Dmitriy Kanarikov picked up his three-year-old son Sunday at a police station to spend time with him for the first time “outside of some sort of institutional setting,” Kelly said.

“He went to a building. ... (and) took the son to the roof,” the commissioner said. “All indications are he threw him off and that’s when he jumped himself.”

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.

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.

It’s the second time this year that a parent and child have been involved in a fatal plunge from a New York apartment building.

In March, a woman clutching her baby son in her arms plunged eight storeys out of a Harlem apartment window to her death, but the 10-month-old survived.