A woman pleaded guilty to kidnapping yesterday after snatching a newborn baby in 1987 and raising the child as her own for more than two decades.
Ann Pettway, 51, appeared resigned to a life behind bars as she entered the plea at a federal courthouse in Manhattan.
Her voice was flat as she briefly recounted how she took a train from her home in Bridgeport, Connecticut to Harlem Hospital, where she scooped up Carlina White, a three-week-old baby who had been brought to the emergency room by her parents.
'I went to the hospital. I took a child,' she said. 'It was wrong.'
Pettway said little else during the hearing, and offered no explanation for her actions. As part of her plea bargain, prosecutors agreed to recommend between 10 and 12-and-a-half years in prison, although the actual term will be set by a judge.
As Pettway admitted her guilt, Carlina's birth mother, Joy White, quietly cried in the courtroom gallery.
Afterwards, she told reporters that she was outraged at the plea bargain, and felt a decade in prison would be too light a punishment for the woman who had robbed her so cruelly.
Justice, she said, would be a term of 23 years, one for every year she was separated from her daughter.
'I've lost 23 years of being with my daughter,' she said, adding that those decades were filled with pain and heartache.
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