It sounds like a movie – even to the young woman at the heart of the story.
Twenty-three years and four months after being kidnapped from a New York City hospital as a 19-day-old infant, Carlina White was reunited with her birth parents this week after playing detective on her own bizarre case for the past seven years.
"I'm overwhelmed. I'm just happy. It's like a movie; it's all brand new to me," White, 23, told New York's Daily News as she arrived in New York from Atlanta to see her birth parents.
Her mother, Joy White, was just as incredulous. "Is it really happening?" she asked. "I always dreamed this."
The reunion follows an extraordinary chain of events that began on the night of Aug. 4, 1987, when a phony nurse nabbed Carlina from Harlem Hospital and disappeared with her.
With NYPD unable to track her down, Carlina was raised in Bridgeport, Conn., under the name Nejdra Nance by a woman named Cassandra Pettway. Around her 16th birthday, Carlina began to believe she wasn't Pettway's daughter – which Pettway then admitted.
Read More: Woman Kidnapped as an Infant Finds Family 23 Years Later
