Carlina White’s case showed that all of this is possible, and that the person most motivated to pursue the truth about a stolen child’s identity might be the stolen child herself.
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## What She Found, and What Remained
The last public accounts of Carlina White from the period immediately following her 2011 identification and the 2012 sentencing describe a young woman navigating a set of circumstances that no template had prepared her for.
She had two names and some claim to both. She had a biological family who had waited for her and a woman who had raised her who was going to prison. She had a daughter who would grow up knowing her mother had found herself on a missing-children website. She had birth parents who were strangers to her — loving strangers, but strangers — and a hometown, Harlem, that she had never known as home.
She said she planned to move forward with her life. She said she would keep “Netty” as part of how she understood herself, even as she became Carlina White legally and publicly.
She had not, by late 2011, been publicly heard from in any sustained way, and later attempts to find her current public presence found little. The Lawyer Monthly retrospective from 2025 noted that she lives privately and has spoken periodically about healing, but provided no specifics, and speculation about her current location or relationships would not be appropriate here.
What she did — the searching, the recognizing, the calling, the submitting to a DNA test while not yet knowing for certain what it would show — required a kind of courage that is easy to underestimate. She did not know, when she called NCMEC, that the results would give her a family to return to. She did not know whether the DNA would match. She knew only that a baby in a photograph from 1987 had a birthmark in the same place she did, and that she had spent years without a birth certificate or a Social Security number, and that Annugetta Pettway had never been able to explain why.