Biotech millionaire, UM donor owns boat towing teen girl killed off Key Biscayne, records show

The boat towing the Ransom Everglades student who was killed in a Biscayne Bay boating accident earlier this month is owned by a renowned biotech entrepreneur who lives in a $23 million Miami Beach home, is a University of Miami donor and owns a 182-foot superyacht in addition to the vessel involved in the accident off Key Biscayne.

Jonathan Rothberg, 61, who made his fortune through several geonomics and medical device companies he founded, is the owner of the black 42-foot 2017 Hanse Fjord that was towing 15-year-old Ella Riley Adler in the water when she was struck and killed by another boat near Key Biscayne’s Nixon Beach, according to international, federal and state records.

READ MORE: ‘The world has been robbed’: Family mourns girl killed in boat crash near Key Biscayne

While marine authorities have identified the boat owner who they say left the scene after hitting Ella, a freshman at Ransom Everglades School in Coconut Grove, they haven’t yet named the owner of the vessel on which Ella was spending the day with friends on the water.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the state police agency investigating the accident, did, however, include that vessel’s registration number in its initial report of the accident.

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection log states that in 2021, a boat with that vessel’s registration number departed West Palm Beach for the Caribbean island of St. Barthélemy.

The vessel’s name appears as “T/T Gene Chaser.” Records from the Cayman Islands, where the boat is registered, link a company under the same name to Rothberg. Rothberg’s yachts — the Gene Chaser and the Gene Machine — have garnered big spreads in the boating, scientific and business trade press in recent years, particularly since he transformed them into floating science labs during the pandemic.

Rothberg hadn’t responded to the Miami Herald’s multiple requests for comment as of Tuesday evening.

The 42-foot boat towing Ella and another girl is a tender, that is, a smaller boat used to shuttle back and forth from a larger boat, in this case, Rothberg’s Gene Chaser, a 182-foot superyacht built in 2020. Photos of the Gene Chaser capture the Fjord, plus a 20-foot Zodiac, a landing craft and a fleet of jet skis all fitting on the sizable stern deck.

Two girls in the water at the same time

The FWC report says Edmund Richard Hartley, 30, was piloting the Fjord, which was towing Ella and the other girl behind the boat around 4 p.m. Saturday, May 11, about a mile west of Mashta Point off Key Biscayne. Ella was on a wake board and the other girl was on a wake surfboard, according to the report.

The girls fell off their boards at different times and in different locations, and both were in the water simultaneously, the report states. The report did not identify the other girl.

Another boat, heading west, “struck the female wake boarder who was in the water, further away” from the boat that was towing her, the report says. Ella died from her injuries.

On the boat with Hartley were Emma Roberts, 30; Sebastian Pearce, 21; seven 15-year-olds; and three 14-year-olds. One of the girls on the boat was Rothberg’s daughter, a classmate of Ella’s at Ransom Everglades, whose 15th birthday was the day before the boat outing, according to the report.

Ella was the granddaughter of Michael Adler, the U.S. ambassador to Belgium. Michael Adler was formerly president of the Greater Miami Jewish Federation and vice chair of the Florida International University Board of Trustees.

Hundreds turned out for Ella’s funeral service at Temple Beth Sholom in Miami Beach, where she was eulogized by Rabbi Jonathan Berkun, the rabbi at Aventura Turnberry Jewish Center, as “a force of nature, a glowing and gorgeous young woman who was loved, admired, cherished and adored by more people than anyone her age would normally be.”

First Lady Jill Biden sat shiva with the Adlers.

Background of captain piloting boat

It’s not clear if Rothberg hired Hartley as a captain. The Miami Herald has reached out to Hartley but hasn’t received a response.

Hartley, who’s from London, studied at the United Kingdom Sailing Academy and at the Glasgow Maritime Academy in Scotland, according to his Facebook profile. The page also says he works in the superyachts industry. A source close to the matter said Hartley is certified through the Maritime and Coastguard Agency in the United Kingdom to captain a ship up to 3,000 gross tons.

According to the FWC investigation report, 78-year-old Carlos Alonso, who lives on the water in Coral Gables near Matheson Hammock Park, was operating the 42-foot 2020 Boston Whaler that struck and killed Ella.

READ MORE: Gables man was piloting boat that struck and killed Ransom Everglades student: FWC report

Alonso’s criminal defense attorney Lauren Field Krasnoff previously told the Miami Herald that Alonso “has no knowledge whatsoever of having been involved in this accident,” and, if he had realized he hit someone on the water, he “absolutely would have stopped.”

READ MORE: Man accused of piloting boat that killed 15-year-old girl off Key Biscayne. Who is he?

“Bill is a good man and he is absolutely devastated by the loss of this intelligent, accomplished and beautiful young woman,” Field Krasnoff told the Herald. “He has cooperated 100% with law enforcement and will continue to do so.”

The FWC said its investigation is ongoing, and the agency hasn’t arrested anyone.

A scientist — and a multimillionaire

In 2021, Rothberg moved to South Florida from Connecticut, buying a $23.5 million house off the Venetian Causeway, Miami-Dade property records show.

An article on the UM website states Rothberg was “seeking to spur innovation through building deep relationships with the University of Miami community.”

His gift to UM’s College of Engineering has led to the Miami Engineering Rothberg Catalyzer Award, which helps fund biotech projects of UM undergraduate and graduate students. The first winners consisted of 13 teams, each receiving $5,000 to push their projects forward.

Rothberg has made headlines with his superyacht Gene Machine, which boasts a fully functional biology lab and team of scientists on board. During the pandemic in 2020, Rothberg and his team spent most of the year on the superyacht developing a low-cost, at-home coronavirus testing kit.

In 2016, President Obama awarded Rothberg the National Medal of Technology and Innovation for his work developing fast, cost-effective DNA-sequencing technology.

Rothberg earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Carnegie Mellon and master’s and doctoral degrees in biology from Yale.

Rothberg, who was born into a family of entrepreneurs, holds more than 400 patents. A founder of several key geonomics and DNA-sequencing companies, Rothberg got his start as a graduate student at Yale in 1991 when he founded CuraGen, one of the first geonomics companies at the time, according to a UM article about him.

CuraGen went public in 1999, valued at $5 billion.

“I’ve spent my career building disruptive solutions to improve the lives of those I love,” according to the UM article.

A Miami Herald photo of a boat docked behind Jonathan Rothberg’s home originally published with this story incorrectly identified the vessel as the one towing Ella Riley Adler when she was killed by another boat while wakeboarding off Key Biscayne Saturday, May 11, 2024. Rothberg does own the boat that towed Adler, but, it was not the vessel shown in the photo.