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.

  • @Dasus
    11•2 months ago

    Did he know he was adopted?

    I wonder how he wouldn’t have. The story says he was six when he was abducted. I learned how to read when I was five and knew my own address at six.

    How did he never like, just say “I’m not from here, please take me home”? I know America is big, but…

    • @Jimmyeatsausage
      7•2 months ago

      I imagine being kidnapped is a pretty traumatic event, and it’s pretty easy to gaslight a child even if they haven’t been traumatized. If every adult in your life keeps telling you you imagined something or dreamed it, it probably sticks after a few years.

      • @Dasus
        3•2 months ago

        You might be right. I find it dubious, but I think you might be.

    • Drusas
      6•2 months ago

      I would agree, but I’ve known a couple of people who swear that they don’t remember early childhood at all, like nothing before the age of eight or nine, or only the vaguest of images here and there. I was skeptical at first because my earliest memory is from the age of two, and it’s fairly clear. It blows my mind that it’s even possible to forget everything without a head injury or something, but I didn’t have any reason to believe they were lying.

      Edit to add: I’m always a little thrown off when I see your username. Just for a second.

      • @Dasus
        3•2 months ago

        Yeah memory is a funny thing I guess. But like, it seems that there would’ve needed to be at least a few years of someone actively blocking the kid from going home if he knew were home was, until he could be gaslighted into believing the new one.

        Edit to add: I’m always a little thrown off when I see your username. Just for a second.

        Took me a while. I was looking at mine, thinking what’s wrong, why would you be thrown, but then I saw yours and I totally got it.