Was Kidnapped Child Adopted?

The New York Times reports about the 24-year-old who was reunited with her biological family after her kidnapping at 19 days old:

As news came that a baby girl abducted from a Harlem hospital 23 years ago was alive, an array of people in her life began absorbing how the closing of the case was resolving at least two mysteries.

For one, her relatives and the authorities in New York City know now that the child born as Carlina White on July 15, 1987 — and kidnapped from Harlem Hospital three weeks later — grew up in Bridgeport, Conn., with a new name, Nejdra Nance.

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At the home on Hamilton Street in Bridgeport where the girl was raised, a relative of the family who lives there was not talking.

But Shatesse Jefferson-Echevarria, 23, a childhood friend of Ms. White, said that friends at school would whisper behind her back that she had been adopted. “She looked very different from her family,” Ms. Jefferson-Echevarria said. “Different demeanor; different face.”

Ms. White harbored the same suspicions as her friends, first because of her looks, and later because she could not get a birth certificate or Social Security number from her parents, the police said. She continued searching for her identity after moving to Georgia several years ago and eventually came across photos on the Web site of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. She matched those with childhood photos she had and called the center, which connected her with her mother, said Ernie Allen, the organization’s president.

Still nothing about whether the people who raised her are the same as the ones who kidnapped her, or whether this was an illegal adoption from the kidnapper. . . .