Luis Armando Albino: What We Know About California Man Found After 70 Years

A little boy who was kidnapped by a stranger has been found alive and well—more than 70 years after his abduction.

Now an elderly man nearing 80, Luis Armando Albino was just six when he was lured from a park in Oakland, California, in 1951 by a woman promising to take him to a store to buy candy. Albino had been playing with his older brother Roger, who was the only witness to the crime, and the boys’ mother never saw her son Luis again; she died in 2005 unaware of his fate.

Despite an enormous search for the missing child at the time, the trail went cold, and the case remained a painful mystery to the family for decades. But a chance DNA test by a relative uncovered an online match with a man living on the other side of the country, who turned out to be the kidnapping victim. After the abduction, Albino had been flown to the East Coast and raised by a couple there.

Albino was born in Puerto Rico and had been brought to the U.S. by his parents with his five siblings in the summer of 1950. He was stolen away just months later, in February 1951. He left the park with a woman wearing a bandanna who spoke to him in Spanish, according to his then 10-year-old brother. A huge search involving police, soldiers from the nearby Oakland Army base, the Coast Guard and the FBI proved unsuccessful.

The child’s mother, Antonia Albino, never gave up hope and was still raising awareness of the case decades after her son vanished, according to local newspaper The Mercury News. She visited the police missing person bureau daily but eventually these trips dwindled to once a year as she repeatedly received the devastating news that there had been no leads in the case.

“She always felt he was alive,” granddaughter Alida Alequin—Albino’s 63-year-old niece—told the paper. “She took that with her to her grave… All this time the family kept thinking of him. 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.”

It was Alequin who ended up breaking the case wide open. She did a DNA test in 2020 “just for fun,” she told The Mercury News. But she was stunned when it returned a 22 percent match with a man living across the U.S., although she was not successful in attempts to contact him to find out more. She renewed her efforts this year after researching more about her uncle’s abduction, and took old newspaper articles and the DNA results to Oakland police in June, where investigators agreed it was a significant lead.

Albino was located by officers and provided a new DNA sample, which was matched with his sister (Alequin’s mother). This time the match was even stronger and it confirmed that the man was Albino. Alequin said she and her mother wept upon hearing the news: “I grabbed my mom’s hands and said, ‘We found him.’ I was ecstatic.”

The FBI brought Albino and some of his relatives to Oakland to meet with his long-lost family in June. He met niece Alequin, his sister, and his brother Roger, who had been the last person to see him.

“They grabbed each other and had a really tight, long hug,” Alequin said. “They sat down and just talked.”

News of the emotional reunion has made headlines around the world, and the social media feed of pop culture site Bored Panda shared a photo of the two brothers meeting again for the first time in decades on X (formerly Twitter), along with a photo taken of the pair as children:

Albino revealed he was a retired firefighter and Marine Corps veteran who had served in Vietnam. He is also a father and grandfather.

In July, he returned for a further reunion with his old family, the last time he saw ailing older brother Roger, who died in August, having finally learned what became of his missing sibling.

Albino has not commented publicly about his remarkable life story and details about the case and the reunion remain vague. It is unclear whether Albino was given a new name, whether the woman who raised him was the same person who took him from the park, and whether he was aware he had a family who were searching for him. His reaction to the discovery and how he felt about meeting his family have not yet been revealed. Newsweek has reached out by email to Oakland Police Department seeking further information and comment.

Police say they have now closed the missing person case, but the FBI are still pursuing the abduction investigation.

Alequin said her uncle was grateful to have been found.

“[He] hugged me and said, ‘Thank you for finding me’ and gave me a kiss on the cheek,” she said. “I was always determined to find him, and who knows, with my story out there, it could help other families going through the same thing. I would say, don’t give up.”

Hundreds of thousands of children and juveniles are reported missing each year, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The circumstances of the disappearance is only recorded about half the time, but in cases where they are, only 0.1 percent are reported as having been abducted by a stranger, according to Reuters.

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