When was carlina white abducted

They might have just asked about the paperwork, or they might have mentioned that without proper I. Whatever they spoke about, Ann called Netty several days later, before leaving work, and told her she wanted to talk to her when she came home. In her whole life, Netty had never seen her mother shed a tear. It was a full seven years before Netty learned the rest of her story. Her real name was Carlina White. She had been abducted as a newborn baby, nineteen days after her birth, from Harlem Hospital and never seen again.

Carl Tyson has large, bright eyes and caramel-colored skin. The resemblance to Netty is unmistakable. The whole time Netty was missing, he tells me, he never lost faith. Joy was the same way. She always had that feeling.

Joy White and Carl Tyson had been the first couple among their friends to have a baby. It was Carl was 22, driving a truck and working nights in a parking garage.

Joy was 16 and still in high school. They had grown up in Harlem housing projects across town from one another, and were together a year when Joy called Carl at work one day, saying she felt sick.

Joy and her mother took care of the baby at her place; Carl stopped by at night after work. But on August 4, when Carlina was 19 days old, she developed a high fever.

Joy called Carl, and they took the baby back to Harlem Hospital. The doctor wanted Carlina to spend the night, and Carl searched for a phone to call their mothers. She seemed to be saying that the baby was fine; it was Joy who needed help. It struck Carl as a strange way to console a young mother. The couple decided that Joy would spend the night at the hospital, but first Joy wanted to get some things. They left together at about a. A detective said Carlina was missing.

Inside, Joy was in pieces, sobbing. Soon Carl was, too. The hospital had discovered that Carlina was gone at a. Whoever took her had unhooked her IV tubes and left the floor without being seen. The hospital claimed the baby had been checked every five minutes. The police believed the kidnapper must have been studying that pattern and had taken Carlina at just the right interval. They suspected a heavyset woman others had seen around the hospital for the last few months.

For a time, police thought they had a suspect, a year-old woman named Lucy Brockington. She was wanted for car theft and fit the relevant description. Detectives tracked her down in Baltimore, questioned her, and decided she had an alibi.

After that, there was nothing—no sign of the woman or the baby. Carlina White was gone. Joy left school for a year, began taking anti-anxiety medication, and went to therapy several times a week.

I was angry with everyone. My temper was short. They broke up about a year after Carlina vanished. Ann Pettway grew up in the East End of Bridgeport. Ann was popular and fun. In , Ann told friends and relatives she was pregnant. No one Ann knew seems to have been with her when the baby was born. She says she is more forgiving—that everything that happened in her childhood was standard issue for where she grew up. Everything that an average person would have, I had.

She was strict, but she was cool. All my friends used to say she was a cool mom. Ann supported Netty by working as a janitor at a local civic center in Bridgeport. Until high school, she sent Netty to live during the week with her own mother, Mary, who lived in a slightly better part of town, so Netty could go to better schools. She spent her time studying new dance steps; writing rap lyrics; and dreaming about modeling or making movies.

Ann was dark-skinned, and Netty was light. Netty remembers gazing at pictures of Ann to see if the two of them looked the least bit alike. What the hell are you talking about? This is not my family? Had Ann met the woman, or was Netty left on the doorstep? With each question, Ann repeated the same answer. She left you and never came back. There was nothing more to it, she insisted.

But Netty was still curious. Her suspicions grew, and she and Ann became more distant. Her relatives had said that Ann was pregnant in the summer of Was she really pregnant?

Did she miscarry? Just before a stranger handed her a baby? Robert Nance, who was in jail at the time on a rape charge, called Netty after a DCF investigator visited him. Netty asked what he knew about her mother. Samani was born in Netty got her high-school diploma, took a job as a motel-desk clerk, and, when Samani turned 1, moved to her own place; then, two years ago, she moved to Atlanta, where her aunt Cassandra had moved a few years earlier.

She found work in a hair salon, tried a little modeling, and still harbored dreams of being a rapper. Ann sent cards and gifts to Samani. Eventually, Netty told Cassandra her secret, and Cassandra encouraged her to keep searching for her birth mother. Late at night, Netty would find herself trolling the Internet for stories of missing children. There would be no resemblance. The site showed pictures of hundreds of kids from all over the country.

For the first time, it dawned on Netty that she could have come from anywhere, not just near Bridgeport. She combed through the photo archive. She saw a picture of a baby girl—a newborn who was just 19 days old when she vanished on August 4, For her part, Pettway turned herself in to authorities in Jan. She apologized for her crime at her sentencing hearing in , when her lawyers reportedly argued that she "was motivated not by greed or desire to do harm, but by a desperate desire for a child, combined with depression and grief over her failed pregnancies and significant mental illness.

Though White didn't appear at Pettway's trial, her birth parents gave emotional testimonies at the sentencing. In his, Carl told Pettway, "What you should get is 23 years, what you took away from me," while Joy said, "I'm broken into a million pieces. United States. Type keyword s to search. Today's Top Stories. The New Power Dressing. Hollywood Loves Books. Smith-Cameron Is in Control.

Who kidnapped Carlina White? This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. It wasn't until White was in high school that she discovered her birth certificate was fake and confronted Pettway about it, per New York Magazine.

However, Pettway claimed that White was abandoned as a child and that she'd taken her in. White spent the next several years searching for her birth parents. In , she noticed that a photo of a missing child in a database looked like her own daughter Samani, according to the Chicago Tribune. White then got in touch with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, submitted a DNA sample, and eventually learned her true identity in ; the following year, Pettway was sentenced to 12 years in prison for kidnapping after turning herself in.

According to The Mirror , the ensuing press attention became too much for White.