Yesterday, about 10 minutes' away from my home, a man threw his four-year-old daughter off one of the highest bridges in the city.

When I heard this news, I was driving home from the supermarket, my six-year-old strapped into his seat in the back, my older son safely delivered to his first day at a new school. I slammed on my brakes, for no reason that made sense, and because my foot immediately started to shake, the car jumped forwards once or maybe twice. The driver behind me honked his horn, then swerved around me, yelling out as he passed. I turned off the radio. 

At home, alone in the kitchen, I heard that the man was thirty-five, worked in IT, lived in one of Melbourne's fairly affluent suburbs (one that would have been described as leafy prior to Australia's six-year drought) and that he was estranged from his wife. 

 Witnesses say they saw the man's car pull into the emergency lane out of the heavy morning traffic on the bridge. He opened the back door of his car, removed a small girl and carried her over to the railing. He held her out until his arms were straight and then he dropped her. Witnesses called paramedics, who rescued the girl from the murky water of the Yarra River, resuscitated her and had her air-lifted to the closest hospital. Then she died. 

Yesterday, it was scorchingly hot in Melbourne - 44 degrees (about 111 farenheit) - and the news in the early morning had been about the weather. The extreme heat had wreaked havoc on the city, buckling metal train tracks and clogging the roads, with the extra demands on power stations causing shutdowns and electricity outages. Fires were raging in several country areas near the city and people were being cautioned to be wary of heat exhaustion which particularly affects the elderly and the  young. Then Darcey died. 

It seems the man had been driving back from his beach house with Darcey and her two brothers - one six years old, one eight - where he had taken them to escape the heat of the city. He had told his wife he would drive all three children back in the morning. Darcey was a few days away from her fifth birthday and it was to be her first day at school. 

The media have been criticised for releasing the details of the man and his daughter. It is highly unusual for them to name names. I'm not sure about the ethics of releasing names but from what I've seen the news reports have been restrained and uncharacteristically quiet, as if they know how unseemly it woud be to be loud about something so awful. The man I heard deliver the news on the six o'clock tv news seemed genuininely upset. He shook his head after reading the bulleting, then looked up slightly off camera to someone who he must have thought would understand what he was feeling - a colleague with a daughter, his boss, his wife? 

Today is hot too. Stories about global warming, drought and the environment are starting to fill the gaps between news of train cancellations and failed traffic lights. But the whole sweaty city seems shocked about what happened to this little girl. A teary witness on morning radio said the girl didn't struggle, that she was very still. Another wondered at what the two little boys must have felt when their father got back into the car and drove them away. Another marvelled that such a small child could survive a 58 metre (190 feet) drop even if only for a few hours.

I wonder about why the man chose Darcey - did he know she was his wife's secret favourite, was it because she was the youngest and most vulnerable, was he crazed and exhausted with the heat and snapped when she chattered, had he thought this through at all?  I think for a minute how Darcey's mother must feel today, and how her brothers will make sense of this, and how it will change all three of them. The heat is dropping and a cool breeze is running threw the window and across my hands as I type.