Snatched baby finds real mother after 24 years

ONE OF New York's most enduring and baffling cold cases thatbegan with the disappearance of a 19-day-old infant from a Harlemhospital 24 years ago seems finally to have been solved - by thevictim herself.

Astonishment has given way to ecstasy for Joy White, the motherwho made headlines across the city on 5 August 1987. The day before,she had taken her then baby girl, Carlina, to the hospital with ahigh temperature. She left the ward for two hours only to find onher return that the cot her child had been in was empty.

With no credible leads and in spite of an offer of a $10,000reward for anyone providing information leading to an arrest,efforts by the NYPD to trace tiny Carlina eventually petered out.Members of the distraught White family said at the time they hadseen a woman in a nurse's uniform dawdling near where Carlina hadbeen left and suggested she may have been responsible for spiritingher away.

But now it is Carlina herself who, with some diligent internetsleuthing, has brought the agony of the lost years to an end,identifying Ms White as her birth mother and rushing to New York tobe reunited with her.

"Carlina was a missing link and we have gotten her back in thename of Jesus, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah," Pat Conway,White's godmother, said after Carlina flew on Wednesday fromGeorgia, where she has been living, to New York and into the arms ofthe extended White clan.

Now 23 years old, Carlina was raised as Nejdre Nance inBridgeport, Connecticut, an hour northeast of New York and afterthat in Georgia. She has told police investigators that she had longharboured doubts about the woman who purported to be her mother ifonly because they didn't look alike. Her concern deepened when shehad her own baby and no one could give her papers like her own birthcertificate.

"Nejdra Nance was very suspicious of who she was and what familyraised her," Lieutenant Christopher Zimmerman of the NYPD. "Therewas no paperwork to follow her such as a birth certificate or socialsecurity card. In her late teens she became suspicious of who shewas."

At one point in her late teens, she even wrote to Oprah Winfrey,the American television presenter, asking for help in establishingher true identity.

It was the internet that eventually provided the key to resolvingthe mystery of her identity and, in particular, the website of agroup called The National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children.

Looking at pictures from missing baby cases that matched her ownage she soon saw a photograph that looked very much like others shehad seen of herself as a baby. She was looking at Carlina White. Orrather at herself.

It was with help from the Centre that she was then able to traceher real mother, separated nowadays from her father, in New York.She travelled to see them for a first time last weekend beforereturning to Georgia. After DNA tests confirmed on Tuesday what shealready knew in her heart, she flew back to New York again onWednesday.

"I'm overwhelmed. I'm just happy. It's like a movie; it's allbrand new to me," she told a reporter from the New York Daily Newsafter emerging from La Guardia airport. As the second meeting withher daughter got underway, Joy, Carlina's birth mother, could onlysay: "Is it really happening? I always dreamed this."

Only Carlina deserves the credit for solving the riddle of herbirth insisted Ernie Allen, the president of the Centre whosewebsite had led to the reunion. "This young woman gets all thecredit," he said "She felt it. Now she could have been just wrong -but in this case, we were able to help her get to the truth."

The woman who raised her, first in Connecticut and then Georgia,was identified as Cassandra Pettway.

She has refused to speak with reporters and so far the policehave not said if they plan to lay charges in the case or even ifthey are certain that it was Ms Pettway who took the small baby fromthe hospital crib all those years ago.

"We have our suspicion, but not enough probable cause to make anarrest," NYPD Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne told reporters.