On August 4, 1987, Joy White took her daughter Carlina to the hospital in Harlem because her baby girl had a high fever. Little did she know that would be the last time she saw her daughter as a child. For all of her life, Carlina Renae White was raised by a woman who wasn’t her mother; Carlina was reunited with her mother Joy White after 23 years.
“I never gave up hope,” said Carlina’s grandmother, Elizabeth. “It is like she has been around us all her life. She wasn’t a stranger. She fit right in.”
That lack of fitting in is what clued Carlina in that her mother was not her mother. Carlina says she never quite felt like she belonged, and when her “mother” was unable to produce a birth certificate, that was the kicker. Carlina browsed the website of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, heard about a baby being snatched from a Harlem hospital 23 years ago, and connected the dots.
A DNA test confirmed what Carlina and Joy knew all along.
Image: New York Daily News
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