NEW YORK — A woman stolen as an infant from a hospital crib two decades ago spent Thursday at a Manhattan hotel with her long- lost mother as investigators sought the evidence they need to identify and arrest her kidnapper.
No suspects were ever identified in the 1987 disappearance of Carlina White, the 19-day-old infant who vanished from Harlem Hospital. Her parents left the hospital to rest after the baby was admitted in the middle of the night with a high fever. She was missing when they came back.
As the years went by, it turned out, the best investigator on the case was Carlina herself, living under the name Nejdra Nance in Bridgeport, Conn. She had long suspected she was at least adopted because the woman who raised her could never produce a birth certificate. Nance also didn’t look like anyone she lived with, police and her family said.
Periodically, Nance would check the website of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, looking through photos of missing infants, she told the New York Post. On Jan. 4, Nance, now 23, saw a baby photo that looked nearly identical to hers, police said. She contacted the site, which then contacted the mother of the missing child, Joy White. The two exchanged photos and talked. A DNA test confirmed it.
Nance was in New York from Friday to Tuesday with her 5-year-old daughter but returned to Atlanta, where she now lives.
“We took pictures. Joy cooked. We had a good time,” said Lisa White-Heatley, Joy’s older sister. “It was like she was never missing.”
