Carlina White a.k.a. Nejdra Nance
Julia Xanthos/NY Daily News/Getty
"It's me who's missing," a 23-year-old woman named Nejdra Nance told Wood, a call center specialist, who spoke to PEOPLE exclusively. "I don't know who I am. I don't know who my parents are. I don't know if my parents have been looking for me, not knowing that I'm going by a different name and birthday."
With that, the woman – who said she'd approached other social service agencies, looked up vital records and gone to another missing persons agency for help to no avail – finally got on track to get the answers she was seeking.
She told Wood she'd realized about five years before that something wasn't right when she asked Ann Pettway, who'd raised her as a daughter, for her own birth certificate. Wood says the caller said she ended up getting a birth certificate (which listed her mother, father and hospital where she was born as "unknown") and a Social Security number on her own through a department of family services.
"She told me she puts 'unknown' on every application where it asks her about her race because she doesn't know her parents' background," Wood told PEOPLE. "She said, 'I could be Hispanic. I could be Ethiopian. I don't know who I am.' "
Wood took down the caller's information so they could try to match her to missing children cases. When they finished, Wood told her a case analyst would run the information and be back in touch. "I just really feel my mother is still out there looking for me," Wood says the caller told her before she hung up.
Less than a month later, DNA tests confirmed that Nejdra Nance was Carlina White, who went missing from Harlem Hospital in 1987, when she was just 19 days old. She has since been reunited with her birth parents, Carl Tyson and Joy White, and Pettway has allegedly confessed to the kidnapping case in Harlem.
Wood said she couldn't be happier for White and her real parents.
"This is why we come into work everyday," she said. "This is what we want for every family we work for. I'm really hoping I get to meet Carlina one day. I'm very proud of her. She's been looking for answers for the past five years and she never gave up. She had some doors shut in her face and she didn't take anything less than the truth for an answer."
For information on the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, please visit their Web site or call the hotline at 1-800-THE-LOST.
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