A 6-year-old California boy who was kidnapped from an Oakland park by a woman offering to buy him candy has been found more than 70 years later.
Luis Armando Albino, who was abducted on Feb. 21, 1951, is now a retired grandfather and Vietnam veteran. He was reunited with his family in June thanks to the persistence of his now 63-year-old niece Alida Alequin—who found her uncle on the East Coast after using an online DNA test, old newspaper records, and family photos, The Mercury News reported.
Alequin’s first tip was the result of the online DNA test in 2020, which revealed her uncle as a 22 percent match—not enough to be sure, but enough to investigate. Her initial attempts to contact him did not receive a reply.
Four years later, in February 2024, she and her daughters found several photos of the adult Albino online and compared them with pictures of him as a child that they dug up in microfilm archives of the Oakland Tribune newspaper.
The similarity was striking enough that, when she brought her findings to Oakland police, a new missing persons case was opened and the FBI and Department of Justice were looped in. Police reached out to Albino and asked him if he’d be willing to take a DNA test.
After the results proved a match, the FBI helped bring Albino to Oakland, along with members of his family, to meet his niece Alequin, her mother, and other relatives unknown to him. He was also able to meet his brother, Roger, who was 10 when he was abducted—Roger died in August, but not before Albino made a second visit to see him and other family members in July.
Albino’s mother, who died at the age of 92 in 2005 and kept a “vigil of hope” for her son, reportedly never stopped visiting the missing persons office of the police every year, believing he was alive somewhere.
“I always knew I had an uncle,” Alequin said. “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.”
The woman who kidnapped Albino in 1951—when he still could not speak English after his family moved from Puerto Rico a year earlier—reportedly flew him to the East Coast, where he was eventually raised by a couple who raised him as their own son, The Mercury News reported.
Oakland police now consider the missing persons case closed, but along with the FBI have kept the kidnapping investigation open.
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