Carlina White

Carlina White, (CP) – A woman who was kidnapped as a newborn 23 years ago to find her real mother said “It was like a dream.”

Carlina White was just 19 days old when she vanished from Harlem Hospital in New York. She tells the New York Post that after the woman who had raised it could not produce a birth certificate, she became suspicious.

White was raised in Connecticut, under the name Nejdra Nance. She now lives in Atlanta.

The Center for Missing and Exploited Children has helped her find her biological mother, Joy White. They were reunited in New York on Saturday.

The newspaper interviewed both women and Carlina’s father on Wednesday.

A kidnapping case that baffled police for more than two decades has finally been resolved, thanks to efforts by the victim herself removal.

Carlina White was less than three weeks in August 1987 when her mother took her to Harlem Hospital to be checked for fever. But when Joy White returned to the emergency department two hours after admission, her daughter had disappeared.

While the abduction made national headlines, as investigators puzzled and finally cold.

But Joy White, who was 16 at the time of removal, has never given up hope that she would see her child again.

That patience was rewarded earlier this month, when a woman of 23 who grew up in Connecticut and now lives in Atlanta, Georgia unexpectedly contacted joy

Police said the young woman who now bears the name of Njedra Nance had long harbored suspicions she was not biologically related to her family. After launching its own investigation, she came across photos of a child posted on the U.S. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children website that she thought was an uncanny resemblance to her own child shots.

Nance contacted the center and was put in touch with Joy. After sending along some of her own baby pictures, White was convinced too.

While the White family said they knew right away that Nance was actually Candice little baby all grown up, he turned to the New York City Police Department conclusive.

“It seemed legitimate and credible, so I had the missing persons (team) to reach out to her,” NYPD Martin Brown told the AP, explaining that DNA tests conducted on Joy White, her ex-husband Carl Tyson, and 23-year-old Nance has now officially confirmed the family ties.

But the long-lost relatives did not wait for the evidence collection, instead of a first meeting last week when Nance traveled to the Bronx with her 5-year-old daughter, Samani.

“It was wonderful, she did not even seem like a stranger, she has just the right person,” Elizabeth White told AP. “We all went there, we had dinner together, her aunts were there. She brought her daughter beautiful. It was magical. “