Horrible

UPDATE: Yes, another custody fight. Contentious enough that the father was supposed to hand over his child to the mother at a police station.

This just breaks my heart. You take your three-year-old (and is there anything more wonderful than a three-year-old?), your child dressed in Christmas pajamas — and then you throw him off the the top of a tall building? Dead God, how does this happen? I can’t stand that we live in a world where people do things like this. I wonder if this was one of those another insane custody tragedies we too often see during the holidays:

NEW YORK (AP) – A man and his 3-year-old son plummeted to their deaths from a Manhattan apartment building, police said Sunday as they investigated what led to the tragedy.

Authorities said they received an emergency call reporting two jumpers from the 52-floor building on the Upper West Side around noon. Officers responding to the scene found the 35-year-old man and the boy on the rooftops of two separate nearby buildings.

The man was pronounced dead at the scene and the child was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital, police said. No identifications were released.

The circumstances of the fall are unclear. Authorities said the father did not appear to live in the building.

Luis Ortiz told the New York Post that he was at the hospital when paramedics rushed the boy there and that they were pumping his chest and working on him.
“You could tell he was slipping away. They said the father was up there, but they didn’t bring anyone else in. It was just heartbreaking. I have two kids of my own. They tried to do the best they could,” Ortiz told the newspaper.

Police investigating the deaths left the building in the mid-afternoon to photograph a gray Lexus RX350 parked nearby.

The building, listed as South Park Tower, is a short distance away from Columbus Circle and Lincoln Center.