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## Growing Up as Nejdra Nance
The woman who raised Carlina White called herself Ann Pettway. Her full legal name was Annugetta Pettway, and she was from Bridgeport, Connecticut. She had grown up in some legal difficulty — a record of youthful offenses for larceny, theft, and forgery — but people who knew her from the neighborhood did not describe her as a dangerous person. She struggled with drug addiction at points in her adult life. And in the years before August 1987, she had tried to have children and had been unable to. According to what she later told investigators, she had suffered several miscarriages.
In 1987, people around Pettway recall that she appeared pregnant. She left Bridgeport for a period, then returned — with a baby girl, who she said was hers. A cousin, Brian Pettway, remembered that the family assumed the child was the baby of Pettway and her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Robert Nance. The baby was named Nejdra Nance and called “Netty” by the family.
What Annugetta Pettway had actually done, according to her own later confession to the FBI, was this: she had traveled to Harlem Hospital, taken an infant she did not know, brought the baby back to Bridgeport by train, and begun raising her as her own daughter.
Carlina, now Nejdra, grew up in Bridgeport with Pettway and with help from Pettway’s mother. She was raised in the belief, at least during her early childhood, that Pettway was her birth mother. She went by “Netty.” She went to school. She lived the life of a child in a working-class Connecticut neighborhood.