Harlem Hospital Center sits on Lenox Avenue in Central Harlem, a large municipal medical facility that, in 1987, served one of New York City’s most densely populated neighborhoods. Its emergency and pediatric departments were busy. The maternity and infant wards moved constantly. In the early hours of August 4, somewhere between 2:30 and 3:55 a.m., someone walked into the unit where baby Carlina lay in a crib, removed her intravenous line, wrapped her up, and walked out.
Nurses said they checked on the infants every five minutes. At 3:40 a.m., they found her missing. A security guard told investigators he had seen a woman matching the description of an unidentified person who had been circulating on the ward leave the building around 3:30 a.m. He thought, based on the way the woman was dressed and carrying herself, that a baby might have been concealed under her clothing.
The hospital’s surveillance system was not working that night.
Joy and Carl were told their daughter was gone. Police were called. Investigators began trying to reconstruct who had taken her, and why, and where she might have been taken. They found no good leads. A woman who had spent time on the ward in the hours before the disappearance, and who had spoken to Joy and Carl while presenting herself as a nurse, had not been a nurse. She had left, and taken Carlina White with her, and for the next twenty-three years, no one outside a small family in Connecticut knew where Carlina White was or what name she was living under.