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Toronto man throws daughter onto busy highway
CTV.ca News Staff
A Toronto child is in guarded condition after she was thrown off a bridge onto the country's busiest highway by her father who then jumped to his death.
It happened around 6 p.m. ET Sunday at the Don Mills Road Bridge over the 401 Highway, which has six express lanes.
The child is five years old. She was still breathing when paramedics got to her. She was taken to the Hospital for Sick Children where she was treated for multiple injuries.
The girl had some internal bleeding, but it has stopped, said Supt. Brian O'Connor of the Toronto Police Service.
"It does not appear that she has any broken bones. She was talkative at the hospital,'' he added at a news conference.
Horrified police and a few bystanders watched it happen but were unable to stop it.
"This guy went to do what he went to do and nobody in my opinion would have been able to stop him," O'Connor said.
Police finally caught up with the man at the bridge after he made a number of cellphone calls to his wife after an alleged parental abduction. He made the calls right up until he jumped.
CTV News Toronto's Graham Richardson reported the police tried reaching the man on the cellphone earlier, but he kept hanging up.
According to witnesses, the little girl, who wore a pink snowsuit, clung to the man's leg as he yelled into his phone.
"He continued to call his wife while he had the daughter and basically, what amounts to psychological torture, he continued to call the wife and say, 'I'm going to kill myself; I'm going to kill your daughter.'
"This guy was a loaded missile. He was going to kill himself and he was going to take his daughter to punish his wife for whatever he thought she had done wrong in the relationship. What he succeeded in doing is harming his wife, harming his daughter, harming a lot of police officers who have children,'' said O'Connor, who added a suicide note had been found.
Witness Susan Bains told CTV News Toronto at the scene: "I did actually make a comment to my friend, saying, 'that's very strange; why is that man holding that child?' And then, almost in a joking way, I said, 'it looks like he might even throw that child over there.'"
And then he did. And then he jumped.
Other witnesses report the police showed up just as the man jumped.
O'Connor said they finally found the man when a driver phoned to say there was a man dangling his daughter over a bridge spanning the 401.
Amazingly, the little girl wasn't struck by oncoming traffic, something O'Connor said was a "miracle."
Bains said she couldn't "think something so tragic could actually happen, that someone would throw their child over a railing like this onto a busy highway.
"I'm in shock. I can't even put this together in my mind right now ..."
Richardson noted that many people saw what was unfolding, "but they didn't really stop and stop him because they couldn't really believe what might be happening."