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Way back on February 21, 1951, a family in in Oakland, California was devastated when one their children, a 6-year-old boy, was abducted while playing with his 10-year-old older brother in a park.
Fast forward almost 73 years later, and they finally found him thanks to an online DNA ancestry test.
Luis Armando Albino, who did not speak English at the time, was taken from his Puerto Rican family when a woman lured him from the park in West Oakland by promising him in Spanish that she would buy him candy.
Instead, the woman had Luis flown across the country to be raised as if he were their own son by a couple on the east coast.
For seven decades, his relatives kept photos of him on display in their homes, and his mother, who died in 2005, never stopped believing that he was out there somewhere, the San Jose Mercury News reports.
It was Albino’s niece Alida Alequin who discovered he was still alive when she took a DNA test “just for fun” in 2020 and saw that she was a 22% match to a retired firefighter and Vietnam War veteran of the Marine Corps.
Trying to learn more, she searched the microfilm archives of the Oakland Tribune at the Oakland Public Library. In those files, she learned about the search parties that looked for her uncle. She also discovered that Luis’ older brother Roger insisted he saw a woman wearing a bandana lead Luis away from the park.
Alequin took all of her newfound information to Oakland police, who then opened a new missing persons case.
With help from Oakland police, the FBI and the Justice Department, Alequin found Albino, now a father and grandfather, and reunited him with his real family.
Alequin told the Mercury News that after being found, Luis Armando Albino was finally reunited with his older brother, Roger.
“They grabbed each other and had a really tight, long hug. They sat down and just talked,” she said.
Thanks to his niece’s investigative work, Albino was able to spend three weeks visiting with his older brother in July, just before Roger passed away in August.