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A boy abducted from a California park at the age of six has been reunited with his family after his niece tracked him down 70 years on.
On 21 February, 1951, a woman enticed Luis Armando Albino away from Jefferson Square Park in Oakland where he had been playing with his 10-year-old brother, Roger.
She promised the Puerto Rico-born boy in Spanish that she would buy him candy before kidnapping him and flying him across the country to the east coast where he would be raised by a couple as if he were their own, according to Bay Area News Group.
He remained missing for seven decades, with his mother, Antonia Albino, keeping a long vigil until her death in 2005.
That is until his niece, Alida Alequin, 63, used DNA testing and newspaper clippings to track him down 73 years after his abduction.
With the help of police, FBI, and State Department of Justice, she discovered her uncle, now a father and grandfather, was alive and on the east coast.
“All this time the family kept thinking of him,” she said.
“I always knew I had an uncle. We spoke of him a lot. My grandmother carried the original article in her wallet, and she always talked about him. A picture of him was always hung at the family home.”
Hope of finding the lost uncle she had never met worked its way to Ms Alequin in 2020, when “just for fun,” she took an online DNA test.
It showed a 22 per cent match with a man on the east coast, but she left it alone when she couldn’t get further answers or a response from the mystery relative.
She was spurred to enlist the help of her daughters, Mr Albino’s grand-nieces, in February 2024 while watching a documentary that included references to Puerto Rican folklore.
Together, they found pictures of the man online, and went to the police on the same day as looking at archived Oakland Tribune articles.
Investigators opened a new missing persons case after agreeing the lead was worth looking into, eventually getting the FBI and Department of Justice involved.
After he was located, Ms Albino provided a DNA sample, as did his sister – Ms Alequin’s mother.
The family received news on 20 June that their long-lost relative had finally been found.
“In my heart I knew it was him,” Ms Alequin said, “and when I got the confirmation, I let out a big ‘YES!’”
She added that they, “didn’t start crying until after the investigators left”: “I grabbed my mom’s hands and said, ‘We found him.’ I was ecstatic.”
With assistance from the FBI, Albino visited his Oakland family four days later, and finally saw his older brother for the first time in over seven decades; the first time since that afternoon in the park.
“They grabbed each other and had a really tight, long hug. They sat down and just talked,” according to Ms Alequin, who said they discussed the day of the kidnapping and their military service.
He returned for a three-week visit in July, the last time he saw Roger, who died in August.
Ms Alequin revealed her uncle has some memory of his kidnapping, but the adults in his life never gave him any answers.
She added that her uncle did not want to talk to the media.
Mr Albino and five of his siblings had been brought to Oakland from Puerto Rico by his mother the summer before he was kidnapped.
After he was taken that early spring afternoon, an extensive nine-block search including police, soldiers from the Oakland army base, the Coast Guard and other city employees ensued according to Oakland Tribune articles at the time, seen by the Bay Area News Group.
Roger Albino was interrogated several times by investigators but was firm in his story that his brother was taken by a woman with a bandana around her head. No sign of Luis was ever found, despite the FBI getting involved.
Oakland police said the missing persons case is closed, but they and the FBI consider the kidnapping a still-open investigation.
The Independent has contacted the Oakland Police Department for further information.
