Niece locates her uncle Luis Armando Albino living on other side of the country after search sparked when she took online DNA test ‘just for fun’

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 US east coast.

Albino, 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 21 February 1951 a woman lured the six-year-old Albino from the park in West Oakland, where he had been playing with his older brother, and promised him in Spanish that she would buy him candy.

  • @[email protected]
    1•3 months ago

    keep in mind this case was only solved because the neice did a DNA ancestry test and found a nearest match. If police wanted this data, they either would have needed to ask said family to turn in DNA (which id imagine back then, wasnt a service at this scale) or to give them 100% access to DNA data of every citizen, which I doubt anyone wants.

    • @norimee
      2•3 months ago

      I’m not criticising that police couldn’t find him themselves. My issue is with the statement, that this is an outcome they “strive” for as if finding him after 70 years (SEVENTY) was an ideal outcome in a child abduction case. As if this was the most they aim for.