It’s one of every parent’s worst nightmares. Your child is sick, and is hospitalized. When you take just a few moments to rest, a stranger comes into the hospital and abducts your child. More than twenty years ago, an infant was kidnapped from a hospital in Chicago. Twenty years later that infant, now a grown woman, has been reunited with her birth mother.
Carlina White was taken from Harlem Hospital in 1987. She was nineteen days old. Things were very different in hospitals in 1987 than they are today. This was before the days when hospitals had surveillance cameras, so there was no record to refer to in order to determine who kidnapped Carlina.
Hospitals at the time did not necessarily require hospital staff to wear large, clearly printed, name tags, with a photograph that could be quickly compared to the person who was wearing the name tag. Today, when a baby is born, the hospital puts a wristband onto the baby. The parents get wristbands with matching numbers. In some places, the wristbands contain something that sets off an alarm if the wearer comes to close to an elevator, door to a stairwell, or door that leads outside. Some hospitals use the same wristband system to protect infants and young children who are admitted to the hospital overnight. In 1987, none of these precautions were in place.
Carlina’s parents, Joy White and Carl Tyson, brought Carlina to the hospital in the middle of the night, because she was running a high fever. The infant was admitted to the hospital. If you are a parent, you can relate to the anxiety that Carlina’s parents must have been feeling that night. A very kind nurse comforted Carlina’s parents, and suggested that they leave the hospital in order to get some rest. When the parents returned, they learned that Carlina was missing. No one had any idea who could have taken her.
Carlina, whose name was changed to Nejdra Nance, was raised by a woman named Ann Pettway. They lived in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Carlina says that Ann couldn’t provide her with a birth certificate, and that Ann was abusive towards her. Carlina recalls that she didn’t look anything like the rest of her family. She became suspicious that she was adopted.
She started checking the website for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, looking at the photographs of missing infants. When she grew up, Carlina moved to Atlanta, and became the mother to a five year old child. At age 23, Carlina looked at the Missing Children website again, but on the New York one. She found a baby photo that looked remarkably like hers.
This lead her to contact Joy White, who the photo belonged to. They exchanged photos and talked. A DNA test was taken, which confirmed that Carlina, now Nejdra, was the biological daughter of Joy White. The two were able to reunited, after more than two decades of being apart.
Image by Nate Smith on Flickr