New | Father hurls son, 3, to death and then kills himself in plunge from Manhattan tower block

Certain things were immediately clear from the bodies that lay motionless on a pair of Manhattan rooftops: A man had plunged from the adjacent high-rise. So had a little boy.

Something terrible had happened, though for hours it was not clear exactly what.

The man, who was 35, was killed immediately by the fall, while his three-year-old son was taken a block away to New York's Roosevelt Hospital in critical condition and died shortly after on Sunday.

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

The father and son did not appear to live in South Park Tower, the building from which they fell.

Luis Ortiz told the New York Post that he was at the hospital when paramedics rushed the three-year-old there and that they were pumping his chest and working on him.