Steve Carter Saw Himself on a Missing Persons Website and Discovered the Truth About His Childhood

Steve Carter grew up in New Jersey after getting adopted from Hawaii at age 4. He didn’t know anything about his biological parents.

As Carter got older and started to consider starting his own family, he grew increasingly curious about his origins. One day in 2011, the software salesman saw a CNN report about a woman who was kidnapped as an infant. 

Annugetta Pettway had multiple miscarriages and was desperate to have a child, so she posed as a nurse and took a 3-week-old baby from a Harlem hospital in 1987 to raise as her own daughter, naming her Nejdra Nance. 

Nance suspected she was adopted by the time she reached her teens, but it was only when she became pregnant in 2004 that she confronted Pettway, who claimed Nance was abandoned by a drug addict. Nance began her own investigation, hoping to find concrete answers. While navigating the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s (NCMEC) website, she saw a picture of herself as a baby. DNA results from 2011 confirmed that she was the missing baby. Nance’s birth name was actually Carlina White.

Pettaway was sentenced to 12 years in prison after pleading guilty to kidnapping White. 

Inspired by White’s story, Carter searched NCMEC’s website and saw an age-progressed image of an adult based on an infant photograph. “My first thought was, ‘Oh my God, that's me,’” Carter told CBS This Morning. 

Carter tells A&E Crime + Investigation he called the police department and was swiftly brushed away. Allegedly, police thought they had already found the missing person, who happened to be his cousin. “They weren't really interested and then call back a month later and said ‘Hey, can you go to the the state police department and do a DNA test?’” Carter says.

The test revealed what Carter was already certain of: The age-progressed image was of him. He was born Marx Panama Moriarty Barnes. Soon enough, he was able to piece together his early life. 

While living in Hawaii, Carter’s birth mother, Charlotte Moriarty, took him for a walk when he was 6 months old and never returned home. His birth father, Mark Barnes, reported both of them as missing, unaware of Moriarty’s intentions. “I spent about a year and a half going crazy driving around the island,” Barnes told People.

Authorities' investigation for Carter and his mother turned up nothing since she had seemingly changed her son's name, birthday and the race of his father.

Carter recalls, “I was found with a woman in a house in Honolulu. I was taken to CPS. That woman was taken into a psych ward and then left. Nobody saw or heard from her since. Nobody knows if she was my mom.”

Whether his mother was the one who actually placed him in the orphanage, Carter says, “Nobody knows. My best guess is, yes.”

His would-be parents were looking to adopt when Carter was 11 months old. At the time, the orphanage was proposing foster parenting. Steve and Pat Carter wanted to adopt, per their son, so they turned down the offer. When Carter turned 4, the orphanage went through a call list of parents interested in adopting him. The Carters were fourth on the list.

Lanae Holmes, Executive Director of NCMEC’s Family Advocacy Division, tells A&E Crime + Investigation, “Steve always knew he was adopted. He just didn’t know that he was a missing child. What we were able to facilitate for Steve in the Family Advocacy Division was a safe space for him to ask a lot of questions and to learn what other folks have gone through.”

NCMEC arranged a meeting between Carter and his biological family. They made up for lost time in a marathon phone session. “I was absolutely thunderstruck and amazed,” Barnes told CBS News. “We just sort of, in an hour, tried to catch up on 32 years.”

For Carter, it serves as a happy but private tale. “I didn’t want this story to come out at all,” he says. “I got a call from the Honolulu Police Department saying, ‘I know you want this story to be quiet but we got a call from NCMEC saying they’re going to release a story about you.’”

He explains that the department wanted to publish his story because of pushback over age progression photos, which usually only cite anecdotal success. A 2017 study published in Science & Justice states that “systematic laboratory studies investigating how recognizable these images are have not produced promising results.” “NCMEC wanted to prove that it is valuable,” Carter says.

Carter ended up meeting White, who shares a similar story to him, through his work with NCMEC. 

However, “my mom is still missing,” he shares. “But if you were to read the letters she shared with her sister prior to us going missing, it was kind of obvious that she wanted to get out. She left a treasure trove of clues that she was gonna leave. She didn’t really want to be a mom. She already had a daughter and wasn’t really sure about me. It’s a large hole that I’m alright dealing with.”

Despite being abandoned at a young age, Carter considers himself lucky: “If you think about it, I made it out better than a lot of the other kids who live in orphanages.”

John Bischoff, Vice President of NCMEC’s Missing Children Division, tells A&E Crime + Investigation that each year, the organization has “roughly about 50 to 60 people that come to us and say, ‘I think I found myself on your website.’”

“A lot of those do not unfortunately pan out,” he notes, adding that that doesn’t stop the division from looking. “We’ll never forget about a missing child. They may have gone missing in the ‘80s or ‘90s. We’re still looking for them today.”