**The DOJ/FBI chronology discrepancy** — the “January 2010” date in a document describing January 2011 events — is noted in the source ledger at the end of this article. All other contemporaneous sources consistently place the NCMEC contact, DNA collection, OCME match, and arrest in January 2011. This article uses the January 2011 chronology throughout.
**The reunion location discrepancy** — one Grio article citing a Manhattan hotel, another citing LaGuardia Airport — is not resolved in available sources. This article does not assert a specific location.
**Pettway’s current custody status** is not verifiable from official sources accessed for this article. The Lawyer Monthly 2025 article reports she served approximately ten years before being released, but without official corroboration this cannot be stated as fact. This article does not characterize her current status.
**Carlina’s childhood household** is described only at the level of what she said directly in interviews and what relatives alleged to journalists. No independent characterization of what daily life was like is asserted.
These limitations are noted not as failures of research but as the honest accounting of what can and cannot be established from the public record for a case of this kind. The core facts — the abduction, the identification, the DNA match, the prosecution, and the sentence — are well-documented. The human experience behind those facts is available only in fragments, mediated through journalism and through Carlina’s own selective public disclosure.
The story she has chosen to tell publicly is the one that is available to be told. The rest belongs to her.