KIDNAPPING: Carlina White

Finding out that 23 years of life has been a lie and that the woman who raised you is your kidnapper is truly horrific but it is the life Carlina White lived.

Joy White was 16 when she found out that she was pregnant with her baby girl. Her healthy mix of fear and excitement was shared with her boyfriend Carl Tyson. On July 15th 1987, Carlina White was born, her name in honour of her father.

Just 20 days later and Carlina was rushed back to the hospital with a dangerously high fever of 104°F (40°C). Doctors quickly found out that Carlina had gotten an infection after swallowing some fluids during birth. She was given antibiotics and had to stay at the hospital until her fever came down.

Joy, distraught over the news, broke down in the hospital halls when a woman in white walked over to her and Carl. The woman was wearing all white, similar to a nurse’s uniform, and began comforting the couple. She’s later quoted as telling Joy a strange thing before they parted ways.

“The baby don’t cry for you, you cry for the baby.”

With both parents at home, believing their daughter will be fine for the night, Carlina was left in the hospital under the watchful eye of doctors and nurses. Yet, it wasn’t enough to keep her safe. Between 2:30–3:55 am a stranger walked into her room, removed the IV drip of antibiotics and walked out with Carlina in her grasp.

Once police were informed of the missing baby, they sent out a unit to the White’s home whilst sniffer dogs and police were searching the hospital grounds on foot, a helicopter had also been deployed in search of Carlina. Carl, who had returned to his apartment, was called by police once they told Joy. Whilst he was informed of his daughter’s abduction all he could hear was his girlfriend screaming in the background.

The couple told police about the woman in white and the things she said once they were together. This triggered the memory in some nurses who remembered a woman over three weeks prior they saw someone similar hovering around the paediatrics ward but just assumed it was either another nurse or a family member. The same morning of Carlina’s disappearance a guard saw a woman walking out at 3:30 am, she didn’t have a baby but it is possible that she could’ve had Carlina tucked inside her clothes. To make matters worse, the security cameras were down at the time that Carlina was kidnapped.

With minimal evidence, the case went cold rather quickly but Joy never lost hope and did everything she could to keep her daughter’s name in the public eye. When 1992 rolled around and there was still no sign of their daughter Carl and Joy sued the hospital using the argument that if they had better security their daughter would’ve never been abducted. They eventually settled for $720,000 which was put aside for the day they were reunited with Carlina.

Whilst this was all going off, the nurse that had slipped into the room and taken Carlina was running back to her home in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

Annugeta ‘Ann’ Pettway wasn’t what you could call a troubled youth but she had her fair share of run-ins with police, ranging from theft to forgery but the police that knew her would say she ‘was not a hell-raiser’. But when adulthood hit she fell into addiction where she most likely met her drug dealing, on-again-off-again boyfriend Derek Nance.

In 1987, Ann told her friends and family that she was pregnant after a string of miscarriages. She suddenly left towards the end of her pregnancy according to one friend but when she returned with baby Carlina, who she had named Nejdra Nance, nobody asked questions.

For a while, Carlina was raised in Bridgeport before moving to Atlanta, Georgia with Ann. Carlina had questions about her parentage for most of her childhood, questioning her appearance compared to what she believed was her mother’s despite that Ann’s family would call Carlina ‘little Ann’.

It wasn’t until 2005 that Ann’s well-structured plan started to crumble around her. Carlina got pregnant and needed to get health insurance but for that, she needed her birth certificate. When she asked Ann, the older woman put it off for weeks before Carlina got frustrated and went searching for it herself. She found her birth certificate stuffed in the bottom of a drawer in Ann’s room. It was when she handed the paper over to officials that Carlina was told it was a forgery. Immediately, Carlina questioned Ann and was given the answer she wasn’t expecting. Ann told her that she was abandoned as a baby. “She left you and never came back.

For the following year, Carlina pressed for more details but Ann constantly claimed she couldn’t remember anything. This led to Carlina searching the internet whenever she could, trying to find a trace of her biological family by looking at kidnappings in Bridgeport from when around when she was born.

In 2010, Carlina went onto the website for National Center for Missing and Exploited Children or NCMEC and with that, she expanded the search out state. With the site, she found pictures of a baby that strongly resembled her daughter Samani but had the exact same birthmark as her. With the help of Ann’s sister, Cassandra Johnson, Carlina contacted NCMEC in December of 2010. Quickly after they put her in contact with Joy White and Carl Tyson.

The family reunited just before Christmas in 2011. “I just always believed that she would find me. That was something that I always believed in myself, you know, that she would come and find me and that’s the same way that I thought it would happen,” Was what Joy said about getting the email telling her about her daughter potentially being found after 23 years. As they spoke, relationships were built and memories were shared between them, Carlina later describe the connection she had with her biological parents. “The mom had that mother instinct. The dad is like talking to a stranger.”

After weeks of constant talking, Carlina flew from Atlanta to New York to meet her biological parents for the first time. Joy picked her and Samani up from the airport and instantly the pair were welcomed by the entire family with open arms.

“It was wonderful, she didn’t even seem like a stranger, she just fit right in. We all went up there, we had dinner together, her aunts were there. She brought her beautiful daughter. It was magic,” Elizabeth White, Carlina’s maternal grandmother, spoke on the night that she finally met her grandchild and her great-grandchild all in one night.

Just before Carlina boarded the flight back to her home in Atlanta a police detective stopped her, confirming that the people she had just been bonding with were indeed her biological family. Telling her in person the positive DNA test results.

News broke that Carlina White, the first known baby abducted from a New York hospital, had been found over two decades later. Carlina returned to New York where she was bombarded with media and news interviews where she said she had to force parts of her relationship with Joy for the cameras. It was becoming extremely overwhelming for her. Whilst Carlina was speaking to the press, Ann Pettway was on the run from the FBI. It was this along with all those overwhelming feelings caused by the situation that drove Carlina back to Atlanta, back to the family that raised her, and away from her biological family.

On January 23rd 2011 Ann turned herself in after an arrest warrant was issued for her arrest. She claimed that she had kidnapped Carlina after having several miscarriages and needing to fill the void that was left behind.

Once the media calmed back down, Carlina legally changed her name to Carlina White but continued going by Netty since it was a name she had picked for herself and felt most comfortable with. She had reconnected with her biological family and has said she still has love for Ann.

“There was a part of me that wasn’t even there and now I feel whole. Even in the beginning of the year with all drama and stuff, I was kind of cloudy. But now I know who I am. That’s the main thing just to find out where you came from and who you are,”

(originally posted on medium.com/@natasha.leigh)