Carlina White did not attend the sentencing, according to available reports. She had not been present for the trial proceedings in available coverage. The Lifetime movie adaptation of her story — “Abducted: The Carlina White Story” — aired in 2012, separate from the legal proceedings.
The sentence came just days before the twenty-fifth anniversary of Carlina’s disappearance from Harlem Hospital.
A 2025 article citing secondary sources stated that Pettway served approximately ten years before being released. No official release date or confirmation of current supervision status was verifiable in sources accessed for this article, and any statement about whether Pettway is currently incarcerated or free would require current official documentation that was not available.
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## How NCMEC Changes Cases Like This
The Carlina White case made history in NCMEC’s records as the longest child abduction case the organization had helped resolve, and the first in which the victim had initiated and led the identification process herself.
Both distinctions matter.
Missing-children databases in the United States existed before NCMEC — there were state-level records and law enforcement databases — but NCMEC’s founding in 1984 created a national clearinghouse specifically for missing and exploited children, with a public-facing website that could be searched by anyone: parents, law enforcement, journalists, and, crucially, the missing children themselves once they were old enough to search.
The age-progression photographs that NCMEC commissions from forensic artists serve a function that only became possible with the organization’s systematic, long-term approach to maintaining cases. An infant photograph, no matter how carefully kept, cannot tell you what a twenty-three-year-old woman looks like. The age-progression image that Carlina found on the NCMEC website was a calculated approximation — generated from her infant photo and from biological family photographs — that was close enough to her own reflection, and to the daughter she could see her own features in, to give her enough certainty to make the call.