David Goldman with his son, Sean, who was taken to Brazil on “vacation” by his late wife four years ago and never returned.

Today’s Asbury Park Press has a lengthy piece about David Goldman of Tinton Falls, who has been locked in a bizarre international custody battle for his son for the past four years.

Columnist Bill Handleman recounts how Goldman’s life plummeted into one of inexplicable heartache soon after he saw his wife and son off for a two-week trip to her native Brazil:

He hugged them. He kissed them. After she passed through security, his wife turned and mouthed the words “I love you” to her husband. She pointed to her eye, then to her heart, then to him. It was a little thing they did.

“I can still see her doing that,” Goldman says now.

That was the last time he ever saw her.

She called the next day from Brazil and told him she was never coming back. If he ever wanted to see his son again, she added, he would have to come down and sign some papers and agree to a series of demands.

Then she married another man, even though she was still married to Goldman. Then she had another child, and in complications from childbirth, died. That left Sean in the custody of his new father, a man whose well-connected family, Goldman contends, has given him every advantage in the Brazilian courts and media, Goldman contends.

Goldman insists he has no secrets in his marital closet that would explain or justify his late wife’s actions.

“People are always saying there are two sides to every story,” Goldman says. “If this was the case, it would have been on Page 1 of Bruna’s court filing. If there had been any abuse or neglect or drugs, anything . . . she could’ve alleged all sorts of stuff. But she didn’t. There’s no skeleton that’s falling out of any of my closets.”

Goldman’s tale is getting a lot of attention in the national media. ABC and the Today Show did reports recently, and both NBC and CBS “are working on big investigative pieces,” Handleman writes.

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