After months of languishing at an abusive boarding school in Jamaica, where boys said they were beaten, waterboarded, starved and whipped, Michigan teenager Elijah Goldman begged to come home.
But his adoptive parents in Traverse City never came for him — not even after Jamaican authorities removed him from the American-run school, placed him in foster care, closed the school following allegations of abuse and neglect, and arrested and charged four school officials with child abuse.
Instead, Elijah’s mother and father — a wealthy, conservative Christian couple who adopted him from Haiti when he was 11 — left him in Jamaica for another seven months, according to the Detroit Free PressAlone and scared, Elijah suffered in silence in a foreign land, desperate for someone to rescue him, to take him back to the quaint Michigan town where he was a track star, went to school, had a girlfriend, and hung out with friends.
“I appreciate you bringing me to America, but you abandoned me,” Elijah, now 17, wrote one recent night at the Detroit Free Press, part of the USA TODAY Networkwhile still waiting to be rescued from Jamaica. “I remain strong, but I am in pain.”
In a heartbreaking child welfare case that has sparked international interest, including from celebrity and advocate for troubled teens Paris Hilton, who has intervened in Elijah’s case, child rights activists are seeking to draw attention to a widespread problem and the dark side of adoption: the abandonment of the vulnerable.
These are parents who adopt troubled children, but then change their minds as if they regret buying them because the children come with too many problems. So they send them away, never to see them again. That’s what child welfare advocates say they believe happened to Elijah, whose adoptive parents sent him to an American-run boarding school in Treasure Beach, Jamaica, in September 2023, for behavioral problems (including viewing pornography) and allegedly abandoned him in the process. According to NBC News.
They never visited him or attended any of his court hearings, where Elijah and other boys revealed allegations of horrific abuse they suffered at the school called Atlantis Leadership Academy. Elijah said he had been cut with a razor and hit on the back with a hammer.
Other boys alleged they had been waterboarded with a hose up their noses, tied to a railing by the neck and beaten, and forced into fights at clubs where staff and local police placed bets. The allegations led Jamaican authorities to remove Elijah and six other American boys from the academy in February and place them in Jamaican custody.
A month later, the school was closed. However, Elijah’s foster parents never came. Elijah said the last time he heard from his foster parents was in April, when they called him during a court proceeding. When asked what his foster parents told him, he said, “They didn’t want me to come home… And they didn’t believe me about the whole court thing… that they were abusing us.”