SUBSCRIBE for Breaking News......A woman's instinct vindicates her mother's faith, write Anahad O'Connor and Al Baker.
NEW YORK: It was an abduction that made headlines and stunned the authorities. A three-week-old infant, taken to hospital in August 1987 for treatment of a fever, was snatched by a woman in a nurse's uniform and never heard from again.
Investigators were stumped and the case went cold. However, the parents of the abducted girl refused to give up hope, believing that some day their daughter might return. Their prayers were answered.
Carlina White, now 23 and living in Georgia, has been reunited with her biological parents, Joy White and Carl Tyson, ending one of the most baffling missing persons cases in the New York Police Department's files. The reunion brought elation to a mother and father racked by pain and anger for more than two decades, and a new family for a woman who had long held suspicions about her past.
Advertisement: Story continues below Last Friday, Carlina White and her family met at the Bronx home of Sheena White, an 18-year-old half-sister who until recently Carlina did not know she had.
''We spoke and got to know each other, and she looks exactly like my mom,'' Sheena White said. ''It felt like we knew each other before we met.''
The improbable case began on August 4, 1987, when Carlina, 19 days old, was taken to Harlem Hospital with a fever. About two hours after being admitted, she disappeared from a paediatrics ward, and detectives quickly narrowed in on a mysterious woman who had consoled her worried mother and had been lingering around the hospital dressed as a nurse.
A suspect was questioned but could not be connected to the abduction.
''We had a description, back then, of a woman who picked up the baby who acted as if she belonged there, or worked there,'' said Paul Browne, a police spokesman. ''It has been an open investigation. Some leads did not work out.''
Carlina was taken to Connecticut and then Georgia, the police said, raised under a different name by a woman who treated her poorly. Carlina's suspicions started to grow when she was about 16, partly ''because the family and her don't resemble each other,'' Sheena White said.
Mr Browne said, ''She has held the view, for a long time, that she did not belong to the family she was living with.''
As her suspicions grew, Carlina White started to investigate, at one point visiting the website of the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children - where, Browne said, she found an infant's photo she believed to be of herself.
She telephoned Joy White, who in turn called the police, not knowing if the young woman really was her daughter. The call was routed to commissioner Raymond Kelly's liaison unit.
Detective Martin Brown answered. ''She knew the NYPD had taken a report on it and wanted to know if we could assist to match some of the DNA,'' Detective Brown said.
White's story ''sounded very unusual and very dramatic'' so Detective Brown relayed the details himself to the missing persons' investigators.
The investigators eventually took DNA samples from Joy White and Carl Tyson, who separated years ago and went on to raise separate families, and checked these against Carlina's.
''The daughter's natural instincts were confirmed with DNA swabs,'' Mr Browne said. The detectives from the original case, he added, were elated.
''It has always bothered them that this kid was never found,'' he said. As the case was still an active criminal investigation, he would not discuss suspects.
''Obviously the missing-person aspect of it is closed, but the abduction part of it is not,'' he said. ''We have our suspicions of who may be responsible, but not enough probable cause to permit an arrest.''
Even before the DNA match, Carlina White and her biological family felt so strongly about their connection that they went ahead with their reunion.
On her Twitter account, she said she planned to move to New York City and was looking forward ''to Sunday dinner''.
Her mother, who maintained her daughter was alive and even used Carlina White's name as her email address, was overwhelmed. ''I know that she never gave up,'' Sheena White said.
The New York Times
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Carlina White Abducted as Infant in 1987 Meets Familyby hatufim2,176 views
Creepy-sounding narrator
talkative12 1 year ago 3