A vulture watches a starving child in southern Sudan, March 1, 1993

In March 1993 Carter made a trip to southern Sudan.
The sound of soft, high-pitched whimpering near the village of Ayod attracted Carter to a young emaciated Sudanese toddler.
The girl had stopped to rest while struggling to a feeding center, whereupon a vulture had landed nearby.
He said that he waited about 20 minutes, hoping that the vulture would spread its wings. It didn't.
Carter snapped the haunting photograph and chased the vulture away....
However, he also came under heavy criticism for just photographing — and not helping — the little girl:

"The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering
might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene."
The photograph was sold to The New York Times where it appeared for the first time on March 26, 1993.
Practically
overnight hundreds of people contacted the newspaper to ask whether the
child had survived, leading the newspaper to run a special editor's
note saying the girl had enough strength to walk away from the vulture,
but that her ultimate fate was unknown.

On 27 July 1994 Carter drove to the Braamfonteinspruit river, near the
Field and Study Centre, an area where he used to play as a child, and
took his own life by taping one end of a hose to his pickup truck...’s exhaust pipe and running the other end to the passenger-side window.
He died of carbon monoxide poisoning at the age of 33. Portions of Carter's suicide note read:

"I am depressed ... without phone ... money for rent ... money for child
support ... money for debts ... money!!! ... I am haunted by the vivid
memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain ... of starving or
wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer
executioners...I have gone to join Ken if I am that lucky."