Nejdra Nance had been doing it for years — pulling up the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children website and scrolling through photographs of children who had vanished. She would search her own state, Connecticut, looking at infant faces that might have grown into the young woman she saw in the mirror. She had her reasons. There was no birth certificate in any drawer of any home she had lived in. There was no Social Security number. When she looked at the family around her, she did not see her own face looking back.
In late 2010, living in Atlanta and now twenty-three years old with a daughter of her own, she widened the search. She looked at New York. And there, on a website built to help find stolen children, she found a photograph of a baby girl who had gone missing from a Harlem hospital in August 1987.
The baby had the same birthmark on her arm that Nejdra had on hers.
The baby’s name was listed as Carlina Renae White.
What happened next — the phone call, the DNA test, the reunion, and the federal case that followed — became one of the most remarkable missing-child resolutions in American history. NCMEC called it the longest child abduction case it had ever helped solve, and the first in which the victim herself had led the effort to identify who she was.
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## A Night Admission in August 1987
The story begins not with a disappearance but with a fever.
Joy White was sixteen years old when she brought her newborn daughter to Harlem Hospital Center in August 1987. The baby, Carlina, was nineteen days old and sick — high fever, an infection from fluid she had swallowed during birth, IVs running into her tiny arm. Carl Tyson, the baby’s father, was there with Joy. They had brought their firstborn to get help, as any new parents would. When the night wore on and the baby appeared stable, they stepped away to rest.