Kidnapping of Carlina White

Pettway spent several weeks in jail in Waterbury, Connecticut as a teenager in 1977 after being charged with larceny.

Carlina Renae White (born July 15, 1987), also known as Nejdra "Netty" Nance, is an American woman who solved her own kidnapping case and was reunited with her biological parents 23 years after being abducted as an infant from the Harlem Hospital Center in New York City.

The case represents one of the longest known gaps in an abduction in which the victim was reunited with the family in the United States.

For years she lived with Annugetta Pettway, a woman she believed was her mother.

However, she later discovered that Pettway was actually her kidnapper.

White was portrayed by Keke Palmer in the Lifetime film Abducted: The Carlina White Story.

Upon discovering her kidnapping and her biological parents, she kept her legal name as Carlina White.

Annugetta Pettway had an abusive upbringing, her mother often beating her with belts and extension cords.

Pettway was motivated to commit the kidnapping out of a desire for a child after having multiple miscarriages.

Carlina was 19 days old when her parents, Joy White and Carl Tyson, took her to the hospital with a fever of 104 F on August 4, 1987.

She had swallowed fluid during her delivery and had an infection.

A woman reportedly dressed as a nurse had comforted the parents at the hospital, but was not a hospital employee.

The woman had been seen around the hospital for three weeks prior to the abduction.

The baby disappeared during the early morning, around 2 am when the shifts were changing.

The hospital had video surveillance, but at the time it was not working.

There was no way of knowing what the woman in white looked like except for the description given by Joy White and Carl Tyson.

The baby had been receiving intravenous antibiotics when, between 2:30 am and 3:55 am, someone removed the IV line and abducted her.

A guard said a woman matching the suspect's description left the hospital at 3:30 am, and that no infant was visible, although the baby could have been concealed in the heavyset woman's smock.

The case was the first known infant abduction from a New York hospital.

Carlina Renae White was raised as Nejdra "Netty" Nance by Annugetta "Ann" Pettway in Bridgeport, Connecticut, just 45 miles from where her parents had lived.

Pettway habitually committed petty crimes during White's upbringing, being placed on probation at least three separate times in Connecticut.

She also pleaded guilty to embezzlement for stealing cash and clothing from the Hudson Belk where she worked in Raleigh, North Carolina.

White attended Thomas Hooker School and graduated from Warren Harding High School in Bridgeport.

Pettway and White later moved to Atlanta, Georgia.

White grew suspicious during her teens that Pettway was not her biological mother, because of her inability to provide a birth certificate.

In 1987, New York City Police Department detectives questioned a woman in Baltimore, who witnesses had identified as having been seen in the hospital, without apparent result.

After the confirmation that Nejdra Nance was really Carlina White, the Federal Bureau of Investigation began a search for Ann Pettway.

The statute of limitations for the state kidnapping law had expired in New York, but there is no statute of limitations for the federal law on kidnapping.

In 2005, when White was pregnant with her daughter, she requested Pettway obtain her birth certificate so she could get health insurance.

Pettway acquired a forged Connecticut birth certificate, which White attempted to use as proof of identity so she could obtain the health insurance, but the officials told her the document was forged.

Later that evening, in a state of shock, White confronted Pettway, who broke down and confessed that she was not White's biological mother.

The revelation was not entirely surprising to White as she had begun to notice that she did not share physical traits with Pettway.

Pettway lied and told White that she had been abandoned by a drug addict.

At age 23, White used websites such as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, where she found that the images of the kidnapped Carlina resembled infant photos of herself as Nejdra and those of her daughter, Samani.

She called the center's hotline and was able to contact her birth family.

DNA profiling confirmed in January 2011 that she was the missing Carlina White.

An arrest warrant for Ann Pettway was issued by the North Carolina Department of Correction on January 21, 2011, for violating her probation from a conviction for attempted embezzlement.

White stated, "I just hope that the officials be able to get her in their hands, so we can just hear her side of the story now."

Pettway turned herself in to the FBI office at Bridgeport on the morning of January 23, 2011.

She had driven from North Carolina to Connecticut to arrange care for her biological son.