The Police Department of Honolulu received multiple phone calls on Thursday announcing that a man threw a child off a pedestrian overpass onto the H-1 Freeway near Ward Avenue. The witnesses to the incident immediately followed the man, who was later arrested and identified as 23-year-old Matthew Higa, a Roosevelt School Graduate who apparently had been sent to psychiatric evaluation prior to the incident.

Witnesses said they didn’t realize at first what exactly had happened, as they though it was a doll, and not a real child what the man threw off, and that they immediately called the police as soon as they realized the tragic event. The victim’s name remains unknown, but apparently it was a 2 1/2-year-old boy. The cause of death still remains uncertain, whether it was the ground impact or the two cars that hit him. The police temporarily closed the freeway for further investigations.

There is an apparent connection between the 23-year-old man and the child, as the police interrogated the boy’s mother and her boyfriend in order to identify how Higa could have taken the boy. According to the Honolulu Advertiser, the mother said she had left the boy with her father as she left for Ala Moana, but she knew nothing more.

According to police reports, the child wandered off the apartment as his grandfather was sleeping earlier in the day, but he had been safely returned home. One guess would be he wondered off again and Higa found him before the authorities did, but there is no assurance that this is what really happened.

The same newspaper also reports that Higa was living in the same apartment building as the boy’s family, and that he had the strangest behavior, screaming in the middle of the night or walking up and down the building stairs all night, which didn’t stop the mother’s boyfriend from paying him visits, together with the toddler. He was even asked to babysit from time to time. The police investigation will continue.