Woman gets 12 years for kidnapping newborn

A woman who snatched a newborn from a hospital more than two decades ago and raised the child as her own was yesterday senten-ced to 12 years in prison.

Ann Pettway, aged 50, had pleaded guilty to kidnapping in February and offered details of the 1987 crime. She said she took a train from her Connecticut home to Harlem Hospital, where she scooped up 3-week-old Carlina White, who had been brought to the emergency room with a high fever.

Prosecutors said it appeared that Pettway, of Raleigh, North Carolina, kidnapped the ailing infant because she wanted a baby “and constructed a web of lies that denied the child the truth about her family for 23 years”.

They said Pettway “brazenly took the daughter from a hospital crib and, when no one stopped her, brought the daughter home with her to Connecticut. If the offence had ended there, in 1987, a lengthy sentence of imprisonment would have been warranted for kidnapping alone. But the offence did not end there. Instead it continued for 23 years.”

The government had also challenged her lawyers’ contention that she provided a “stable, loving, and happy home”, saying that Pettway was convicted of five crimes while White was in her custody and had told the probation department that she used cocaine from 1983 through to 2005 and smoked marijuana every day until she was in her early 30s.

The government also said White’s biological mother had informed the department that her daughter told her Pettway once hit her with a shoe so hard that it left an imprint on her face.

As Pettway admitted her guilt, Carlina’s birth mother, Joy White, quietly cried in the courtroom gallery.

Afterwards, she told reporters she felt a decade in prison would be too light a punishment for the woman who had robbed her so cruelly. Justice, she said, would be one year for every year she was separated from Carlina.

“I’ve lost 23 years of being with my daughter,” she said, adding that those decades were filled with pain and heartache.

The case was solved by Carlina herself.

As she grew up in Connecticut under the name Nejdra Nance, the girl became increasingly suspicious of her own identity. Pettway ultimately told her a part-truth. She admitted that she was someone else’s daughter but claimed she had been willingly given away by a drug addict.

Carlina said she browsed the website of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children for clues to her identity. After matching a photo of herself with one on the site, she tracked down her true mother and they reunited in January of 2011. A DNA test confirmed they were mother and child.

Today, they speak every day, Joy White said.