Mom of teen who disappeared off NY beach with friend begs ocean for her son’s body: ‘You took them, give them back’
The grieving mom of one of two teens swept into the ocean off a New York beach last week begged the seas to return her boy to her Tuesday — saying, “You took the life out of them, give them back.”
Aminatu Noah, the mother of 16-year-old Elyjha Chandler, made the heartbreaking request four days after her son and his childhood friend, 17-year-old Christian Perkins, vanished into the waters off Jacob Riis Park after a swim Friday evening.
The bodies have yet to be found — and the US Coast Guard called off the search late Saturday after scouring more than 600 square-miles of water, from Sandy Hook, New Jersey to Long Beach, New York.
That’s left Noah with few options besides standing at the water’s edge and pleading with the cruel sea that snatched away her only son.
“You took them, give them back,” she said, her voice breaking. “You took the life out of them, give them back. I want him to just come to us. There is no closure when you don’t know where your kid is. Just come home.”
But he has not come back — and there is no respite for his shattered mom.
“I don’t sleep, I don’t eat,” she told The Post. “My friends forced me to eat, because they say I might end up in the hospital, and they don’t want to see that.”
“As a mom, you are thinking [about] something taking him, something eating him up, and I can’t do nothing,” she continued. “As a mom, I can’t go save him. I can’t say, ‘I’ve got you.’”
Chandler and Perkins disappeared from the knee-high water in which they stood at about 6:30 p.m. when a vicious wave struck them, according to dad Urshell Chandler.
“He wasn’t far out in the water,” he said previously. “One of the boys told me when the water hit them, it was like a demon coming at them.”
At an unrelated Tuesday press conference, Mayor Eric Adams called the two families’ loss “unimaginable.”
“You pour so much into your children, and these young boys were not doing anything wrong,” Adams said. “They were doing what young boys do. It’s hard. It’s painful. You never really recover … it’s a painful moment.”
Chandler, an athletic kid who loved school and basketball, could not swim and was scared of the water, his family said.
But the teen — who would have turned 17 on June 28 — came to the beach on a whim, ditching basketball practice for the waves.
The two boys were in a group of four who took to the water.
A good Samaritan tried to save Chandler and Perkins, but he could not drag them back to shore.
“A man pulled him out,” Urshell Chandler said. “He was looking at Elijah. His eyes were opened wide. Elijah went up and down three times, and then they didn’t see him again.”
On Tuesday, the distraught dad said he has not been able to go back to work — “I cry every couple hours,” he said.
He maintains a vigil on the beach, where he goes every day to wait for his lost son to find his way back into his arms.
“I walk along the edge of the water, looking to see if I can see anything,” he said.
“But I have not. I will continue to go, every day. This is hard on the family.”
