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The FBI is searching across several states for a woman suspected of having kidnapped a baby from a New York hospital 23 years ago and raised her in Connecticut under a different name as her own child.
The search for Ann Pettway was launched after Carlina White made a sensational reunion with her natural parents after she carried out her own investigation into her kidnapping. The case is believed to be a first – never before has a child been reunited with her parents after such a long time following an abduction carried out by a stranger.
The kidnapping horrified New Yorkers when it happened on 4 August 1987.
Carlina White, then 19-days-old and weighing 3.6kg (8lb), was taken to Harlem hospital in Manhattan after she developed a high fever.
Her parents, Joy White, then 16, and Carl Tyson, 22, left her overnight on the 17th-floor children's ward where the infant was given antibiotics. But in the middle of the night she disappeared.
Witnesses had previously seen an unidentified woman dressed in a nurse's uniform hanging around the ward. She had been spotted on several occasions in the hospital passing off as a nurse over the previous five months.
Last weekend Carlina White was reunited with her natural mother and father, who have now separated, after she herself approached a missing children's agency. She had grown suspicious over the years that the family in which she was being brought up was not her own.
She was raised in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and later Georgia under the name Nejdra Nance. When she asked Pettway for evidence of her birth, her "mother" refused.
White was 16 years old when she again confronted Pettway and extracted an admission from her that she was not her natural mother.
White told the New York Post, which first reported the reunion, that she had also been mistreated by Pettway, who beat her with a shoe.
Pettway told the newspaper that she would clear up the confusion. "I'm coming back to straighten this all out. I raised her, and I was a good mom," she said.
But since the Post talked to her, Pettway has disappeared and is now the subject of a police hunt, though she has yet to be charged. As details of her life emerged, it transpired that she has had a long history of crime including drug offences, theft and one incident in which she was convicted of impersonation and forgery.
White continued to be on the missing person's list for 23 years after her abduction. The National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children kept a page on its website in which it posted an artist's impression of what she would have looked like aged 19, that bears a remarkable resemblance to her appearance today.
After White contacted the missing person's agency it put her in touch with her real parents, and a DNA test confirmed the connection. After last Saturday's reunion she told the Post that when she looked at Joy White "I can see me. With that other woman [Pettway] I would always be searching for stuff we had in common, but I had nothing in common with her. It's like being born again."
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