No formal charges were brought against Harlem Hospital in connection with the abduction. The failure of the surveillance system and the apparent inadequacy of access controls in 1987 are documented facts of the case, but institutional liability was not adjudicated in proceedings available for this article.
The woman who posed as a nurse — Annugetta Pettway — had, according to police accounts, been in and around the hospital in the period before the abduction, familiarizing herself with the environment. Joy White recalled that Pettway had spoken to her and Carl on the night they arrived with the baby, presenting herself as a nurse and offering comfort. Joy later told reporters that Pettway had said to her: “The baby don’t cry for you, you cry for the baby” — a comment Joy interpreted as an attempt to get the parents to leave the ward.
Whether Pettway’s behavior that night constituted a premeditated plan or evolved more opportunistically is not established in the public record.
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## Pettway’s World Before the Abduction
Understanding what was happening in Annugetta Pettway’s life in 1987 requires sorting through accounts that include her own admissions to investigators, what her family and associates described to reporters, and characterizations offered by defense lawyers in the context of a legal proceeding — each of which carries different evidentiary weight.
What Pettway admitted to the FBI was this: she had suffered multiple miscarriages before the abduction. She had gone to Harlem Hospital. She had taken the infant. She had brought her to Bridgeport by train.
What people around her recalled was that she had appeared pregnant in the period before she arrived with a baby. A cousin, Brian Pettway, said the family assumed the baby was hers. The cover story of a biological child, supported by the staging of a pregnancy and the production of a fake birth certificate, held for more than two decades.