Michigan Couple Adopts Boy from Haiti, Then Abruptly Abandons Him in Jamaica at 17!

After months of languishing in 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 a foster home, shut down the school following allegations of abuse and neglect, and arrested and charged four school officials with child abuse.

Rather, Elijah’s mom and dad — a wealthy and 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 Press. Alone and afraid, 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 them for bringing me to the U.S., but they abandoned me,” Elijah, now 17, wrote one recent night to the Detroit Free Press, part of the USA TODAY Network, while still waiting to be rescued from Jamaica. “I’m staying strong, but it hurts.”

In a harrowing child welfare case that has sparked international interest, including that of celebrity icon and advocate for troubled teens Paris Hilton, who has intervened in Elijah’s case, children’s rights activists are seeking to draw attention to a pervasive problem and dark side of adoption — abandonment of the vulnerable.

It’s where parents adopt troubled children, but then change their minds in a buyer’s-remorse kind of way, because the kids come with too many issues. 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, over behavior problems — including watching pornography — and allegedly ditched him in the process, according to NBC News.

They never visited him, nor attended any of his court hearings, where Elijah and other boys disclosed allegations of horrific abuse they endured at the school called the Atlantis Leadership Academy. Elijah said he was cut with a razor and beaten in the back with a hammer.

Other boys reported being waterboarded with a hose up the nose, tied to railings by the neck and beaten, and being forced to engage in club fights, where staff and local police would place bets. The allegations prompted Jamaican officials to remove Elijah and six other American boys from the academy in February and place them in Jamaican custody.

One month later, they closed the school down. Still, Elijah’s adoptive parents never came. Elijah said the last time he heard from his adoptive parents was in April when they called during a court proceeding. When asked what his adoptive parents told him, he said: “They didn’t want me home. … And they didn’t believe me about the whole court thing … that they were abusing us.”