Mother of Boy, 3, Thrown Off NYC High-Rise Says Father Killed Child, Himself to Spite Her
The mother whose son was killed after her estranged husband threw him off a Manhattan high-rise believes her son was killed to spite her gaining custody.
Svetlana Bukharina revealed that her husband had previously told her that he would give custody of their son to her if she left him all other assets in the divorce.
"When we first separated, Dmitry told me that he would leave me alone only if I left him everything we had together. Money and assets were most important to him," Bukharina said in a statement through her lawyer, Alla Roytberg. "Otherwise he said, he would take the child away and I will 'shoot myself from grief."'
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A law enforcement source elaborated on Dmitriy Kanarikov's threats to the New York Post, revealing the estranged husband had told his wife: "If I can't have him, then you can't."
Kanarikov threw his son from the roof of a 52-floor building in New York City before leaping to his own death on Sunday.
Kanarikov was due to drop his son Kirill off with his estranged wife after a routine custody visit. However, he took the boy to a building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and threw him to his death before taking his own life. The father died instantly, but Kirill managed to survive the initial fall and was rushed to Roosevelt Hospital in cardiac arrest where he succumbed to his injuries.
"They were pumping his chest and working on him, and nothing," Luis Ortiz, a bystander at the hospital, told The New York Post. "It was just heartbreaking … They tried to do the best they could."
New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly spoke about the tragic incident on Monday.
"The precise nature of the threat was that unless she signed over the house to him that he was going to take the child," he said.
"The husband was granted what I call supervised visiting rights, where the father only had the child in some sort of institutionalized setting," Kelly continued. "Yesterday was the first day that was not the case."
