A suicidal father threw his son off the 52-storey Manhattan skyscraper before jumping to his death on Sunday amid a bitter separation battle with his violinist wife.

Systems analyst Dmitriy Kanarikov, 35, was reportedly having problems over the division of properties with former wife, Svetlana Bukharina. She sought police protection when her former husband supposedly threatened to kill the kid.

Karanikov was on his first unsupervised visit with 3-year-old, Kirill, when they climbed up the South Park Tower, where a friend used to reside, at around 11:45 a.m.

Twenty minutes later, the troubled father threw his son off the ledge before jumping himself. They were found on the rooftops of the adjacent buildings where they landed. The boy was still clad in his Christmas pajamas when his broken body was found.

He was supposed to bring him back to Bukharina at the NYPD's 17^th Precinct at approximately 1 p.m. They never showed up. Karanikov also did not leave any note explaining his actions.

However, Bukharina offered a glimpse into the psyche of her former husband. In a statement published in Radar Online, she said what transpired was Karanikov's "sick way to take Kirill away from me."

She also said that he threatened to take Kirill away so "I shoot myself from grief."

"When we first separated, Dmitriy told me that he would leave me alone only if I left him everything we had together," the mathematician/violinist added.

New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly confirmed the threat on Monday that Karanikov will take the child "unless she signed over the house to him."

"The husband was granted what I call supervised visiting rights, where the father only had the child in some sort of institutionalized setting. Yesterday was the first day that was not the case," the police officer added.