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Kidnapped Baby Returns Home After 23 Years!
By
Garth Johnston
Published Jan 19, 2011
Modified Jan 19, 2011
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By
Garth Johnston
Published Jan 19, 2011
Modified Jan 19, 2011
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A New York Hospital horror story has found a happy ending after 23 years. In August 1987 20-day-old Carlina White's concerned parents took her to Harlem Hospital with a fever of 103° only to have her promptly vanish without a trace. Though the case garnered headlines—it remains the only known hospital kidnapping in New York history—the baby was never recovered and the prime suspect, a black woman in white scrubs who consoled White's mother, was never found. Until now!
Last year, a young woman raised in Connecticut and Georgia, on a hunch her "family" wasn't actually hers, did a little snooping on the internet and found missing baby pictures of Carlina that looked suspiciously like her own photos. A few e-mails, phone calls and DNA tests later and it was conclusive: Little Carlina White was alive and well. Earlier this week she was reunited with her biological family to what we can only imagine was intense joy. "We had a ball. I cooked and invited all the family. We hugged and cried. She wanted to know about everyone," gushed her ecstatic mother, who was only 16 when her baby was taken, told the Post.
"I already knew in my heart that this was my daughter," her father Carl Tyson, who was 22 when the girl disappeared, told the News. "All I could do is shed tears." White's parents separated a year after Carlina was taken and have both started their own families. In 1992 they obtained a $750,000 settlement from Harlem Hospital for the horrible incident.
Where exactly White has been for the past two decades has not been released, nor has the name she was living under, but if she has been with her kidnappers they could still face federal prosecution—there is no statute of limitations for the kidnapping of a child under 18 if the child remains alive.
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