Father kills himself and son in 52-storey plunge

A FATHER involved in a bitter custody dispute with his estranged wife threw their toddler to his death from the top of a Manhattan skyscraper – then leaped to his doom.

Dmitriy Kanarikov with wife Svetlana Bukharina and Kirill. Picture: Contributed

Dmitriy Kanarikov, 35, was an hour away from having to give back three-year-old Kirill when he took both their lives.

CCTV footage shows him leading the red-haired child by the hand into the 52-storey building on Sunday.

Mr Kanarikov died instantly when he landed on a university building next door.

Kirill, who was wearing a white and orange striped shirt, a little blue raincoat and socks from the film Cars, was rushed to hospital in cardiac arrest but died too.

Mr Kanarikov’s only connection to the building was that he had a friend who once lived there, a police source said.

“He goes into the building with the child. Then, we believe to the roof, based on a witness,” the source told the New York Daily News. “It would appear that he dropped the child and jumped afterward.”

Mr Kanarikov, a Ukrainian immigrant, had only months before written on Facebook how he wanted to be “the best dad and husband” and that “nothing is more important to me right now”.

Svetlana Bukharina, Kirill’s mother, also wrote on Facebook around the same time: “I have the best husband and son in the world”.

According to sources at the New York Police Department, their marriage lasted four years before souring in August and turning nasty.

They apparently hated each other so much that they had to meet at a New York Police ­Department station to drop off and pick up their son.

At 10am on Sunday, Mr Kanarikov, a systems developer with a financial company, picked up Kirill as arranged and was due to take him back at 1pm.

At 11:45pm he was seen on CCTV walking into the high-rise Lincoln Square Tower in the Upper West Side.

He threw his son off and followed him over the edge at 12:05pm.

A police source said that one of the parents had recently complained that the other failed to return their son within his allotted time period.

According to the New York Post, Ms Bukharina, a mathematician and violinist, is a “mess”.

She told police that her husband once threatened to kill himself and their son. They rowed over money and she took out a protection order against him, though it was lifted in September.

Photos posted on Facebook from earlier this year show a very different story.

In March, both parents posted a video of their blue-eyed son in his pyjamas reading a book with the caption: “This is what happens when we do a bedtime story.”

Another picture taken at the beach shows them as a happy family of three with Kirill holding his father’s knee.

It was reported that a neighbour of Mr Kanarikov’s parents in Brooklyn said it seemed as if “that kid was his world”.

The neighbour said: “He was a serious guy. He didn’t smile much. But when he was with the kid, he always looked happy.”