This provision was directly applicable to Pettway’s case. She had taken Carlina when Carlina was nineteen days old — clearly under eighteen. Carlina was alive and identifiable. The crime had been committed in 1987, twenty-three years before the charges were filed. Under state law, prosecution might have been time-barred. Under federal law, Pettway had no protection from prosecution based on the passage of time.
The interstate element — the train ride from New York to Connecticut — was what made the federal charge available in the first place. Pettway took the baby across a state line, and that act brought the federal kidnapping statute into play from the moment it occurred. The federal jurisdiction persisted for twenty-three years, waiting for an identification that finally came through the initiative of the person who had been taken.
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## On Privacy and Reporting Limits
This article has navigated, throughout, a boundary that deserves explicit acknowledgment: the distinction between what is legitimately in the public record and what belongs to Carlina White’s private life.
The public record includes the facts of her abduction, documented by NCMEC, the NYPD, the FBI, and contemporaneous media coverage. It includes the DNA identification, confirmed by the OCME. It includes Annugetta Pettway’s arrest, charges, guilty plea, and sentence, documented by court records and prosecutorial press releases. It includes Carlina’s public statements in the period immediately following the identification — interviews she gave to journalists, statements she made about her experience and her intentions.
What is not in the public record — and what this article has declined to speculate about — is what Carlina White’s life looks like now. The Lawyer Monthly retrospective from 2025 notes that she lives privately. Her daughter, who would be in her late teens or early twenties by now, has not been identified by name or described in any detail. Carlina’s current relationships with her birth family and with the legal aftermath of Pettway’s case are not described in publicly available sources and are not the business of reporting that respects the limits of what journalism should do to private individuals who have not sought ongoing public attention.