She said she still loved Pettway, the woman who had raised her — a statement that some found difficult to understand and that the prompt for this article correctly notes should not be condemned. Complex feelings toward a complicated primary caregiver, in the specific and extraordinary situation of having been raised by your own abductor, are not a failure of judgment or loyalty. They are the emotional reality of a person who spent her entire childhood with someone, whatever that someone had done.
What she felt toward her birth parents took more time to sort out. Carl Tyson, in particular, felt like a stranger to her in the early days. The White family’s warmth was genuine, but warmth and familiarity are not the same thing. Carlina stepped back from intense engagement with the birth family as media attention intensified in the weeks following the reunion. By late 2011, she and her birth family were in touch and speaking occasionally by phone.
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## Ann Pettway Surfaces
As the DNA results confirmed Carlina’s identity and NCMEC updated her case file from “missing” to “located,” investigators moved to find Annugetta Pettway.
The timing of events around Pettway’s involvement with law enforcement in January 2011 needs to be stated carefully. The DOJ press release the prompt identifies as the primary source contains a January 2010 detective-interview date that appears to be a typographic or factual error — the identification of Carlina and the resulting investigation occurred in January 2011. The FBI charge document released January 24, 2011, and other contemporaneous news sources are consistent in placing the operative events in January 2011.