It was the first infant abduction from a New York City hospital.
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## What Investigators Found — and Didn’t Find
The 1987 investigation proceeded without the DNA databases, the social media leads, or the digital surveillance infrastructure that would become available to law enforcement in later decades. NCMEC existed — it had been founded in 1984, three years before the abduction — and Carlina’s case was entered into its records, with a photograph taken at or shortly after birth.
Joy White and Carl Tyson spoke with investigators, described the woman who had presented herself as a nurse, and tried to help narrow the field of possible suspects. Witnesses at the hospital provided what descriptions they could. But the woman who had taken their daughter was not identified. No arrest was made. No suspect was charged.
NCMEC periodically updated the missing-child records for long-term cases, commissioning forensic artists to produce age-progression photographs — digital renderings that estimated what a missing child would look like as they grew older, updated every two years until the child’s eighteenth birthday and every five years after that. Age progressions are produced by NCMEC’s forensic artists using photographs of the missing child, combined with photographs of biological relatives taken at the age the child would currently be, and applied knowledge of how faces develop and age over time. Each image takes approximately eight hours to produce.
Carlina White’s case remained open. Her photograph, and later her age-progression images, stayed on the NCMEC website, in the category of non-family abductions.
Joy White never stopped believing her daughter was alive. Her sister, Lisa White-Heatley, would later say that Joy “always knew she was alive.” Carlina’s entry in the missing-child database accumulated years — five years, ten years, fifteen years — while the girl who had been taken from Harlem Hospital lived in Connecticut under another name and grew up knowing, in some unresolved corner of her awareness, that something about her life did not add up.