Серый Волк.ру Поэтомания

by Michael Daly Dec 23, 2013 5:45 am EST

Months after vowing to be ‘the best dad and
husband,’ Dmitriy Kanarikov threw his 3-
year-old son off a Manhattan high-rise
building and then jumped to his death after
him.

Surveillance video from the lobby shows Dmitriy
Kanarikov leading his 3-year-old son into the
52-story apartment building at 124 W. 60th St.
in Manhattan at 11:45 a.m. on Sunday.

Kanarikov was not a resident, but the video
shows that he and the boy passed unchallenged
by the lobby Christmas tree and moved on
toward the elevators. The doorman apparently
did not think to question what was so clearly a
dad with his toddler son.

Some 20 minutes later, police say, a resident of
a penthouse apartment saw what looked like a
body fall past the window outside. A woman
who lives on the 29th floor also would report
seeing a plummeting body.

Shortly afterward, a caller reported to 911 that
there were two bodies, one on an outcropping
from the building, a smaller one on the low
rooftop of an adjoining structure.

The FDNY paramedics who responded moments
later declared 35-year-old Dmitriy Kanarikov
dead at the scene. But little Kirill Kanarikov was
still alive, and they rushed him to an
ambulance, an air mask over his small face.

St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital is directly across
the street from the back of the building, and in
under a minute the boy was being rushed into
the emergency room, a big hand pressing on his
chest. One witness says the boy was wearing
Christmas pajamas.

Back in March, a 44-year-old woman died after
jumping from a building uptown while clutching
her 10-month-old son. The boy had survived,
but the fall was only eight stories.

The fall for Kirill was just too high. The trauma
team surely hoped for a holiday miracle
nonetheless, but it was not to be.

While police say they may never be entirely
sure what transpired in the boy’s final minutes,
the witnesses in the penthouse and on the 29th
floor lead them to believe that the father took
Kirill up to the roof. Kirill landed far enough
away from the building that police think his
father started by throwing him. The father
landed closer to the building, which suggests
that he had then jumped.

A booming sound heard by a man who worked
at the emergency room of the hospital behind
the building further suggests that the father
and son plummeted from a great height. That
particular noise is much too familiar to people
who witnessed the jumpers from the twin
towers of the World Trade Center on 9/11. The
building on West 60th Street is just under half
the height of the towers, but someone falling
from its roof would have soon been going more
than 150 miles per hour and would have taken
nearly four interminable seconds to land.

In the aftermath, police determined that the
boy’s parents were in the middle of a contested
divorce and that the mother had been awarded
custody pending a trial scheduled to commence
on January 17. The father, a systems analyst
originally from Ukraine and now residing in
Brooklyn, was allowed to spend part of the
weekend with Kirill. It was arranged that the
hand-off would take place at a neutral location,
in this instance the NYPD’s 17th Precinct
stationhouse on the East Side of Manhattan.

As was prearranged, the father picked up Kirill
there at 10 a.m. Sunday, with a requirement
that he return the boy there at 1 p.m. The
weather was uncommonly warm on a winter
solstice in which winter had momentarily lost its
bitterness, a perfect day for the father to take
the boy to Central Park, maybe the zoo there.

The father kept driving west.

At West 60th Street, he parked. Anybody who
saw him and the boy getting out of the car
might have figured they were arriving a little
early for the 1 p.m. matinee of the magical
Nutcracker at Lincoln Center a couple blocks
uptown.

Instead, the father led Kirill into the soaring
apartment building. Police believe that an
acquaintance possibly lived or lives there. Police
also believe that the father’s reason for
choosing it was its height.

The lobby video only told police when the father
and son arrived. Detectives and crime scene
investigators worked into the night seeking to
piece together exactly what transpired next.

“It’s one of those things you’re never going to
really know,” an NYPD official later said.
In another video, one the mother posted on
Facebook back in January, the father looks on
as Kirill uses a red brush to clean snow off the
back of a car.

“Daddy’s little helper,” wrote the mother,
Svetlana Kanarikov, adding a smiley face.
She added of their son, “It took us 5 minutes to
convince him that it is not necessary to sweep
the entire street.”

She posted on another day, in March, “I have
the best husband and son in the world.”
On the father’s Facebook page are photos he
posted in September of himself and Svetlana at
the beach with their son. Dmitriy had also
posted a kind of declaration.

“I want to be the best dad and husband,” he
wrote. “Nothing is more important to me right
now.”

Whatever happened, court records indicate that
divorce proceedings began by October, with
Judge Jeffrey Sunshine awarding the mother
“pendente lite custody,” meaning pending the
outcome of the case.

The mother, who is also said to be from
Ukraine, seems to have been the very best kind
of mom. She changed her Facebook profile
picture just last week to one of her son peering
at the camera over her shoulder. She no doubt
would have been expecting to collect the boy at
the precinct in the afternoon and spend the
coming week with him while he was off from
school for the holidays.

A great mom can have no sweeter time than
with a child still young enough to believe in
Santa, or, in the Ukrainian tradition, Svyatyy
Mykolay (St. Nicholas) or Did Moroz (Father
Frost).

Dmitriy had other ideas. He seems to have
entered that building with the intent of inflicting
the deepest imaginable hurt on her even
though that meant murdering his own son.

As the winter solstice brought the start of the
longest night of the year, it also seemed the
darkest along West 60th Street. The Christmas
tree in the building’s lobby brought only the
thought of a little boy in Christmas PJs being led
past it by the very worst kind of dad.