That last provision — the unlimited time window — is what made prosecuting Pettway possible in 2011 and 2012. New York State’s own limitations period for the relevant state offenses may well have expired. In federal court, no such barrier existed. The twenty-three years that had passed since the abduction did not immunize Pettway from prosecution.
Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, under U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, handled the case. Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrea Surratt prosecuted. The case moved from initial criminal complaint in January 2011 through indictment in February 2011, guilty plea in February 2012, and sentencing in July 2012.
The twelve-year sentence Pettway received, within the recommended range of ten to twelve and a half years negotiated in the plea agreement, was less than the maximum her offense allowed. It was also, by the measure of Carl Tyson and Joy White, far less than what the theft of twenty-three years deserved.
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## NCMEC and the Category of Self-Identified Children
The Carlina White case sits within a small but documented category of cases in which missing children — having grown into adults who were old enough to search, and who had enough information or physical evidence to raise serious questions about their own identity — used the NCMEC database to find themselves.
Another notable case in this category is that of Steve Carter, who in 2000 found an age-progression image on the NCMEC website that he believed matched him. Carter followed the website’s guidance, contacted police, provided a DNA sample, and was confirmed to be Marx Panama Moriarty Barnes, a child who had gone missing in Hawaii. Carter’s case, while different in circumstance from Carlina’s — he had been raised in a different kind of ambiguous situation — illustrates the same structural dynamic: an adult, uncertain about their own origins, uses a national missing-children database to locate evidence of who they might have been.