In 1987, a pregnant 16 year old named Choi White gave birth to a little girl at a Harlem hospital center in New York City. Although Troy and her 22 year old boyfriend, Carl Tyson, had thought long and hard about whether they should keep the baby or not when she first got pregnant. From the very moment their daughter came into the world, they were obsessed with her named Carlina.

She was this beautiful little bundle of joy, always smiling, always laughing. Duane Carl couldn't have been more excited about being able to raise her together, and they had so many different things planned out in their minds that they wanted to do an experience with her. But little did the couple know as they were holding Carlina in their arms for the very first time, someone else was watching their newborn daughter from afar.

A complete stranger. And this stranger wanted their daughter for herself. My name is Andy Jiang, and this is the hidden stories.

After Joy and Carl took their daughter home from the hospital, they began the long process of slowly figuring out how to take care of her and raise her. But although at first, everything seemed perfectly normal. Just 19 days after Colleen away was born, she suddenly came down with a terrifying 104 degree fever. When joined Carl frantically Boston daughter back to Harlem Hospital Center, asking what was happening to her.

They were informed that Collina had developed a really bad infection from accidentally swallowing some fluid when she was being born. As a result, due to her fragile and unstable condition. She had to stay at the hospital and receive antibiotics through an I.V. tube until her infection went away. When we heard about this, she was obviously extremely upset. As a 16 year old girl who had literally just become a mom, she was terrified that her newborn daughter wouldn't make it and was also really unhappy that she wouldn't get to be with her daughter while she was going through all of this.

But Esau was sobbing in the hallway outside of the pediatric ward where Carlina was being kept. Worried sick about all these worst case scenarios that could easily happen. A woman dressed in all white suddenly approached her, comforting her and telling her not to cry. She seemed to be some sort of nurse at the hospital, and when she reasserted that everything would be okay and that she didn't need to worry about anything.

So it was extremely grateful and suddenly felt a whole lot better about things. Although before she had been panicking and had no idea what she was going to do. The nurse's presence helped calm her and helped her look at things more logically. Realizing that there was nothing more that she could do for her daughter at the hospital, Joy decided to head back home with Carl to clean up and get some rest.

She trusted that the medical staff would be able to take great care of Paulina and would be able to help her make a full recovery. So she went off to bed. But only a couple of hours after Joy had just fallen asleep, she was suddenly jolted awake by a loud noise coming from her front door. When joined, her mom went to go see who it was.

They were surprised to see two detectives standing outside their house. Joyce heard immediately sick. She was convinced that Carlina had to have died and the detectives were there to inform them of the news. But although the detectives told Joy that that wasn't the case, what they said had actually happened was even more horrifying. Turns out sometime between 230.

And for him that night during a shift change, someone had stolen to his daughter from a room in the hospital and she was now missing. The detective said that although the hospital had surveillance cameras, they were broken, so no one knew who the kidnaper was or were they had gone off to. However, they said that they were doing their best to investigate everything as soon as they could, and they then asked whether she knew anyone who would do such a thing or whether she had any other potential leads.

But by then, Joy wasn't even thinking straight anymore. This was her worst nightmare come to life. This was worse than our worst nightmare. And she was sobbing uncontrollably, just unable to comprehend the fact that her daughter was really gone. When joined her mom and right back to the hospital, along with Joy's boyfriend, Carl, they found numerous police officers and detectives running all over the entire building with numerous dogs and even helicopters combing through the surrounding areas.

However, no matter who they asked, it seemed like no one knew anything at all and that no new evidence had been uncovered yet. It wasn't until Joyce herself started thinking about the time that she'd spent at the hospital. The day before that, the very first lead in the case was finally uncovered. As it turns out, the woman. Wait, wait.

Who had a surgery. The woman who Joy had thought had been a nurse, hadn't been a nurse at all. Apparently, many people had seen this woman always hanging out in the children's section of the hospital in the weeks leading up to Colleen's abduction. While all the patients and parents going through the children's section had assumed that she was just a hospital worker, all the actual hospital workers had assumed that she was just a patient or a parent.

And since a person matching the strange woman's description had been seen leaving the hospital that night at around 3:30 a.m., shortly after Carlina had disappeared from her bed, this woman soon became the number one suspect in the case. In hindsight, it was clear that all along, for whatever reason, this woman had been secretly watching each of the children moving in and out of the hospital, waiting to find one that would be a good fit to steal.

The woman had been trying to comfort her. Joy realized she had simply been trying to get her to leave so that she could steal her baby. But although the police soon launched a massive search to find the woman, since there was very little information on her outside of an extremely rough sketch of her face that was made by Joy and the other witnesses, they had very little luck.

Every lead that came in soon went caught. And even though detectives put up pictures of Carlina White all around the area through the hospital, hoping that someone would recognize her, no one did. In the days and weeks following the abduction twitted everything she could to bring more attention to the case, giving countless interviews about her story to the local press.

For her, the loss of her daughter had been beyond devastating. She was always crying and had to start taking pills because she could no longer fall asleep at night. But despite Joy's efforts, as years went by and still no new information came to light, the case of Carlina Way was soon forgotten by the public. But although Zoe and Carl tried to move on with their lives as well, they just couldn't enjoy his own words.

Through something that you can't explain when you have a missing child. It always stayed with me. She was always on my mind. I always wondered where she was at. I would get on trains and I would just look at girls and I would think that maybe that's her. In the end, the constant stress of having their newborn child stolen from them was simply too much for joy and Karl to handle, since they were both still so young.

All the pain, anguish, regret and devastation that they felt from losing Carlina began to slowly drift into their own relationship, and as a result, they soon broke up. Despite this, however, they both later agreed to still work together to sue Harlem Hospital Center for their negligence in letting their baby be abducted and to win Carl's eyes. The hospital was completely at fault.

If they'd even just slightly better security, it simply would have never been possible for Carlina to have been kidnaped so easily. In 1992, five years after the kidnaping, a court agreed with them and they won a settlement of $750,000 for the pain they had suffered, which was later reduced to 162,643 poor parents. But although this was a ton of money, it still didn't make up for the loss of their daughter.

Since Joy and Carl had both never given up hope firmly believing that Carlina was still alive and that she would be found someday. They decided to place some of the money in a trust fund for her so that she could have it when she came back. Then, Joy just kept on doing her part, giving interviews about the story whenever she could, doing her best to keep the case alive.

Although she had pretty much already accepted the fact that the police wouldn't be able to solve the case. She really believed that if she kept on pushing Carlina story out into the world, one day Carlina herself would come across it and that she would recognize that she was this missing child. As years turn into decades, Joy still refused to give up this last shred of hope.

She desperately, more than anything, just wanted to know where Carlina was, what she was up to. She figured that Carlino must have been far, far away from her by then. But little did she know this entire time. Her daughter had just been around an hour away. Now, before we continue with the story, this show is sponsored by Better Help.

All of my closest friends know me as the sort of chronic overthinker, all these random and just completely irrational thoughts are always popping up inside my head without my control. And a lot of times it can get really, really overwhelming. It often just kind of feels like I'm just stuck inside my own head and this deeply negative loop of overthinking all these absolute worst case situations about friendships, relationships, and really just everything else that happens in my life.

Now, whenever I'm really overthinking something, and I'm sure some of you can probably relate, I just it's impossible for me to focus on anything by that point. All your emotions are just completely out of your control, and it kind of feels like the anxiety just completely engulfs you. But what I found and what almost every other overthinker that I've talked to has also found, is that a really great way to get out of all of these racing, irrational thoughts is to just talk them through with someone that can do with friends or with family, but also through therapy.

Therapy is something that almost anyone can benefit from, not just people who have experienced major trauma. It can help you really talk through all of your worries, control your negative thinking cycles, and find that incredible mental and emotional peace. And now, with better help, it's never been easier to get started. One of the best things about Betterhelp is that it's entirely online, so you can get access to therapy straight from the comfort of your room.

It's very quick and easy for you to get set up. Takes around 24 hours on average for you to be matched with a licensed therapist. And you can also switch therapists at any given time completely for free, get a break from your thoughts. With better help, you can visit. Better help dcoms. Less hidden stories today to get 10% off your first month.

That's better help eight CLP Dcoms that's hitting stores. Now let's get back to today's story. On that fateful night back in 1987, a 26 year old woman named and Pettway walked out of Harlem Hospital Center, hiding a newborn baby underneath the intentionally thick clothes that she was wearing. Although she had tried having a baby herself several times in the past, she had always suffered a miscarriage, which made her terrified that she would never be able to ever be a parent and says and was also scared that her boyfriend, a local drug dealer named Robert Nance, would leave her when he realized that she was incapable of having a baby.

When she had yet another miscarriage, she decided that she would just have to steal someone else's baby and pretend that it was her own, that she had just given birth to since then, had been temporarily living alone, away from her boyfriend and her family at the time that she had this latest pregnancy, when she suddenly brought this newborn baby girl back to her home in Bridgeport, Connecticut, no one question where the baby had come from in their eyes and had been pregnant and now she had a daughter.

So nothing at all seemed out of the ordinary. As a result, when the daughter herself began to grow up and get older, she too had no idea that and was not her real mother and decided to name her Netra. So her full name was Netra Netts, but her friends and family had always called her Nettie, since she grew up surrounded by a lot of family members during her childhood, Nettie was always at family events, having cookouts, parties, or just simply hanging out with her cousins, uncles and aunts.

Her best friend became her all Cassandra and sister, who she would spend hours studying her dance moves with and dreaming together about their future lives. But although she had a relatively happy childhood, it wasn't without its dark moments. Her mom and was a drug addict who was often under the influence and would severely beat her from time to time.

But although and could be extremely strict, Nettie figured that she just had to do what she had to do as a parent in the area where she grew up, it was completely normal for parents to hit their kids. So even as a teenager, Nettie never really held that against her mom, despite everything she greatly cared for and loved dad, never knowing that her real mom was just 45 miles away, still desperately looking for her.

As Nettie continued to get older, though, she began to become more and more aware of the fact that she and her mom and look absolutely nothing alike, for one, and was dark skinned. And that she was light skinned. However, although this had always been a bit puzzling to her, Nettie had no reason to question anything or did suspect that something was up as a result.

It wasn't until 2005 when Nettie suddenly found herself pregnant at the age of 17, that the reason she looked so different from her mom was finally revealed. Although her baby hadn't been planned, Nettie and her boyfriend were really excited about becoming parents together. However, since Nettie needed her birth certificate to get free prenatal care from the States, she soon went to an to ask for her since she had never really known her dad, who only came by every now and then when she did go to Nettie, surprised, confusing, and kind of just brushed her off, telling her not to worry about it and that she would help handle it.

Nettie couldn't understand why her mom couldn't just give her her birth certificate and why she had to go and just over complicate things. And when some time had gone by and then still hadn't done anything, Nettie just got tired of waiting. She decided to simply go through aunt's belongings herself, and she soon came across a document with her name and birth date on it.

But when Nettie took this document to the local Bureau of Vital Statistics in New Haven, Connecticut, and presented it as her birth certificate to receive her free health care, she was shocked to be told by the clerk to leave immediately before they called the cops. The clerk told Nettie that her birth certificate was fraudulent, that it had been faked, and when they stormed back home, furious and confronted and about this, her mom suddenly burst into tears, apologizing to her, Your mom left you and told her, and she never came back and explained to Nettie that she wished that she could have told her sooner.

But this didn't change anything. Her real mom had a cared about her, but. And did. And that's why she had taken Nettie in as her own daughter. When afterwards hit Nettie, her stomach felt sick. This wasn't her family. Those weren't her cousins. That wasn't her grandma downstairs. Although she had a million questions and she began asking who her real mother was, where she had come from, what she abandoned her, and where she was now and always had the same answer.

She left you and never came back. That was it. She insisted she didn't know anything else and there was nothing more to it. However, Nettie was still curious, although the rest of the Pettway family had taken the news fairly well and not the same amount of love for Nettie and for and that they had always had. Nettie had trouble believing that and really didn't know anything about her biological mother, and she began to suspect that there was something more to the story.

So she began trying to do some digging on her own. When the Connecticut Department of Children and Families, or DCF opened a file on her case to verify that and indeed wasn't her mother, Nettie tried asking her caseworker whether her DNA could be cross-referenced with some DNA database of missing children. However, her caseworker simply told her, that's TV stuff and just informed that that unfortunately, they wouldn't be able to help her figure out her real identity.

So Nettie started researching local missing children cases herself since then and told her that she was born in New Haven. She began to look through all the unsolved stories in the state of Connecticut when her dad, Robert Nance, who was in jail at the time, called Nettie and told her that no one had actually been with then what she had supposedly found Eddie abandoned.

She became even more suspicious. However, since then, he couldn't find any local missing children cases that matched her appearance. Over time, other things started coming up and she began to just move on with her life. Later that year, Ned's daughters, Simone, was born soon afterwards, Nettie got her high school diploma, got a job as a motel desk clerk, and then later moved to Atlanta, where her best friend, her Aunt Cassandra, had moved just a few years earlier, although many still stayed in contact with her adoptive mother and she didn't feel nearly as close to her as they had been before she had learned that she was adopted.

Deep down, she felt that a piece of her was missing. She felt that in order to move on with her life, she needed answers about who her biological mother was, about what had actually happened over the years. Nettie would still, from time to time, find herself browsing the Internet for missing children cases, hoping that she would find something, anything of substance.

But wherever she looked, the children in the photos wouldn't be her color or just wouldn't look like her. Although she kept two investigations to herself at first, she eventually confided in her Aunt Cassandra that she still wanted to know the truth. Despite being and sister Cassandra encouraged her to keep on searching for this truth. So Nettie did. Neither of them could have ever imagined just exactly what finding out the truth would mean for the woman who had raised Nettie and Pettway the week before Christmas in 2010.

Nettie, 23. By then decided for the very first time to expand her search beyond the Connecticut area. It suddenly dawned on her that her mom and could have been lying about her birthplace and that in reality she could have come from anywhere, really. However, as Nettie was combing through the missing children photo archives from the state surrounding Connecticut, one specific picture suddenly caught her off.

It was a photo of a baby girl named Carlene, a white who strongly reminded Nettie of her daughter. Someone everyone had always told her that Simone looked just like her. And not only that, Carlina had vanished on August 4th, 1987, a date that was very close to Nettie supposed birthday. When Nettie sought to send her the photo, her aunt confirmed that the baby did look a lot like her.

However, it's Nettie wanted to be absolutely certain that she was this missing baby. Before doing anything, she soon decided to call the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. She didn't mention finding the photo of Colleen away. Instead, she just stated that she suspected that the woman who she had thought was her mom had actually kidnaped her when she was born.

And she just wanted to try and figure out who she really wants in Nettie Size, if the center could match her profile with Carlina White, even without her mentioning seeing the resemblance in the baby photo, she would know for certain that this was her true identity. Although Nettie was extremely frustrated and struggled a lot with answering some of the questions that the center asked her to try to pinpoint who she was, Cassandra helped her through it and eventually brought up the fact that she had a distinctive birthmark on her right arm.

And when the specific birthmark was cross-referenced with the census records of missing children, a single match was found in Ellis profile, the cold case of Carlina White in January 2011, more than 23 years after the night that Carlina White had been abducted from Harlem Hospital Center, Nettie was finally reunited with her parents, Joy Waite and Carl Tyson. When Joy and Carl saw their daughter again, they both could hardly believe their eyes and just couldn't stop crying.

Out of sheer joy. Although Nettie was in crying herself, she felt the exact same way that they did. After all this time, she had finally done it. She finally found her real parents, her real family, her real identity, and everything in her life was finally starting to make sense. All the missing puzzle pieces were finally starting to come together.

However, although Nat is first interactions with her parents over the phone and then in person made her unimaginably happy, her reunion with them very quickly soon went sour, despite having received DNA confirmation that she was indeed Carlino White and that Joy and Coral were indeed her parents, Nettie soon began to feel incredibly homesick for her old family. As a result, to her parents despair and frustration.

After spending just a few days with them, she decided to book a plane to get back to her home in Atlanta. However, the very day that Nettie wrote back, the news of her reuniting with her parents hit the Internet and it was blowing up everywhere. Since you've been missing for 23 entire years, it was the longest that any missing child had gone before being reunited with their parents again in American history.

By far as search, every major news channel wanted a piece of her story. And before long, reporters began reaching out. Tinetti offered to fly her back to New York and to put her and her parents in a big, fancy hotel for a proper reunion. Although Nettie agreed to this, it would turn out to be a horrible decision. Everywhere she went in New York, she was absolutely mobbed by the media.

Reporters were booking rooms on her hotel for just to get closer to her. And it got to the extent that she couldn't even leave her room without someone coming after her joy. And Carl actually enjoyed the attention, telling the reporters that their dream had finally come true and that Nettie was more like them than they could have ever imagined.

But although Nettie tried to be happy in front of the cameras as well, she just couldn't help but feel sick. She was being told to kiss her parents and hold their heads, things that she hadn't even done in private with them yet. She hated the attention, and she hated being always bombarded with questions from reporters wherever she went.

And when the media began claiming that her kidnaper and Pettway was an abusive drug addict who was an absolutely horrible mom in prison, that was the last straw for Nettie in her eyes, and had never been a bad mom and had cared for her and done what she could to raise her the right way, and that she had said all of that to the news reporters.

But they're just taking the small part of her story about physical abuse in her childhood and completely twisted it and blown it out of proportion to make everything seem more negative at the time and was on the run from the FBI facing a federal prison sentence of 20 years to life. Nettie Parents, Joy and Carl had absolutely zero remorse for her.

As Joy put it. I want her to suffer. I want her to do some time. Like I suffered for 23 years. However, Nettie didn't feel the same way. Regardless of what happened, she still loved it and she still cared for her as a result. Shortly after the report on and broke, Nettie decided to go back to her old home of Atlanta, Georgia.

Again, Joy and Carl couldn't believe it. Never in a million years imagine that after they got their daughter back to be so willing to leave them once again and it hurt them beyond belief. Back in Georgia, Nettie stopped calling her biological parents as often as she had been. Even at her old home reporters just kept coming after her.

Before long, Nettie had become so anxious from all the constant bombardment of attention that whenever anyone would approach her, she would just start to sick. She soon had to check into a hotel to avoid her house and all the press that was always there. As time went on, Nettie relationship with Joy and Carl only continued to get worse.

Although Nettie had long stopped giving interviews, Joy was still going at it. During one of these interviews, she accused Nettie of trying to actively distance herself from both her and Carl during another interview to claim that Nettie had seemed less interested in reuniting with them when she found out that their trust fund for her had long been depleted of its money.

But although Joy had meant to attack Nettie in any way and she just wanted her daughter back when she found out about all these things that Joy had been saying behind her back, she was furious. Before long, she cut off all contact with Carl and Joy. And sometime after her kidnaper and Pettway finally surrendered herself over to the FBI, Nettie agreed to testify on her behalf in support of her if needed.

Despite this, however, on July 30, 2012 and Pettway was sentenced to 12 years in prison. During her hearings, she apologized to Joy and Carl saying, I am deeply sorry for what I've done. If you don't accept it, it's understandable. I'm here to right my wrong. A short while left that he had cut off contact with her biological parents.

She reached back out to them and made up with them. She agreed with them that they'd started off on the wrong foot with lots of misunderstandings, and that it'd be nice to try and start fresh. However, it's unknown how close Nettie and her parents have gotten and how close they still are to this day. Since her last encounters with the press.

Nettie has lived an almost entirely private life. Doing one of the last interview she gave, though, she said that despite everything, she was happy to finally know the entire truth. She said that although she was going to keep her legal name as Carlina White, she would still tell everyone that her name was Nettie. In her eyes, Nettie wasn't the name that her old family or her new family gave her.

That was the name she gave herself. And she was going to keep it. Take care, guys, and I'll see you all next week.