Picking up/ Dropping with Dynamic Parenting and Physics

I made a thread earlier about this project, but it was a different problem. I hope I can make this new thread.

I am trying to animate a claw machine claw that opens and closes and can pick up items in the claw machine. All the items in the claw machine are active rigid bodies attached to a gravity field. What I want to happen is this: the claw picks up an item, lifts it up, and drops it. I want the gravity to take over when the item is dropped.

Thus far I am able to make the claw pick up objects using parent constraints. The object to be dropped, a toy in the machine, is parented to both the claw and a locator. The toy starts off on the floor, where it is parented to a locator that sits at its same location. The claw lowers, and the claw parent constraint weight gets turned to 1 and the locator weight turns to 0. The claw raises, carrying the toy, and then I move the locator up to the toy's new position. I swap the weight from the claw to the locator, the turn off the blend parent attribute. When this happens, I thought the toy, being at the location of the locator, would let the gravity field take over and fall to the ground. Instead, it snaps to the ground where it originally was with no physics effects.

I just want the toy to fall to the ground with gravity effects after I turn off parenting to the claw.
This seems like a very simple task that is probably done a lot in Maya. I've been searching around and experimenting on my own for days and I can't get close to what I want. Could someone give me some tips or point me in the right direction?

Picking up/ Dropping with Dynamic Parenting and Physics

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