A man who was abducted as a six-year-old while playing in a California park in 1951 has been found more than seven decades later, thanks to the help of an online ancestry test, old photos, and newspaper clippings. The Bay Area News Group reported on Friday that Luis Armando Albino’s niece in Oakland—with assistance from police, the FBI, and the Justice Department—located her uncle living on the other side of the country.
Niece’s Determined Search Leads to Family Reunion
Albino, now a father and grandfather, is a retired firefighter and Marine Corps veteran who served in Vietnam, according to his niece, 63-year-old Alida Alequin. She found Albino and reunited him with his California family in June. On February 21, 1951, a woman lured the six-year-old Albino from the park in West Oakland, where he had been playing with his older brother, by promising him in Spanish that she would buy him candy. Instead, the woman kidnapped the Puerto Rico-born boy, flying him to the East Coast, where he ended up with a couple who raised him as if he were their own son. Officials and family members didn’t disclose where on the East Coast he lives.
For more than 70 years, Albino remained missing, but he was always in the hearts of his family, and his photo hung at relatives’ houses, his niece said. His mother died in 2005 but never gave up hope that her son was alive. Oakland police acknowledged that Alequin’s efforts “played an integral role in finding her uncle” and that “the outcome of this story is what we strive for.”
In an interview with the news group, she said her uncle “hugged me and said ‘Thank you for finding me’ and gave me a kiss on the cheek.”
@NCMEC (National Center for Missing & Exploited Children)
Twitter Sep 23, 2024 https://x.com/NCMEC/status/1838202656021483756
