Pettway stalled. She offered excuses, delays, and eventually produced a document — a birth certificate — that officials later determined was a forgery. When Carlina tried to use that document, she was told it was not valid.
A Connecticut vital records clerk, when Carlina sought to locate a legitimate record under her name and stated date of birth, found nothing. The state’s Department of Children and Families was notified. Connecticut’s Commissioner of Children and Families, Joette Katz, later told reporters that Carlina had informed the department that Pettway had told her she had been given to Pettway as a baby by a woman who used drugs — that her birth mother had abandoned her.
Pettway, when confronted more directly, admitted to Carlina that she was not her biological mother. Her explanation was the abandonment story: that Carlina had been left by a woman who was unable to care for her. She told Carlina, according to accounts Carlina later gave: “She left you and never came back.”
This was not true. Joy White had never left her daughter. She had stepped away from a hospital room for a few hours of rest while her baby was in medical care, and her daughter had been stolen.
But Carlina did not know that yet.
She knew she was not who she had been told she was. She knew her documents were false. She knew there was a missing piece of her identity that no one in the household was going to supply. And she began to look for it herself.