Luis Armando Albino was 6 years old playing at an Oakland park with his older brother Roger on Feb. 21, 1951. On that fateful day, a woman lured Albino from the park, promising the boy in Spanish that she would buy him candy.
The woman abducted and took him to the East Coast, and raised him there.
Now, more than seven decades later, Albino has been found thanks to help from an online ancestry test, old photos and newspaper clippings.
Albino’s niece, Alida Alequin, shared with KTVU that her uncle remained missing despite the efforts of the Oakland Police Department and the FBI.
His family never gave up searching.
The 63-year-old was determined to find him and got a big break after taking a DNA test online in 2020 \"just for fun\", matching with a man on the East Coast.
The test showed a 22 percent match with a man who eventually turned out to be her uncle. A further search at the time yielded no answers or any response from him, she said.
\"My daughter found a lot of pictures of this man, and we started comparing. The resemblance was so strong; how much he looked like my other uncles. And then another picture where he looked so much like my grandmother, that one gave me chills, and I said ‘there’s something here,'\" said Alequin.
Albino, a father and grandfather, is a retired firefighter and Marine Corps veteran who served in Vietnam, according to Alequin.
Alequin told KTVU that her uncle \"hugged me really tight and said, ‘Thank you for finding me’ and gave me a kiss on the cheek.\"
\"It was just hugs and tears, lots of hugs and tears…It was nice,\" she said.
For more than 70 years Albino remained missing, but he was always in the hearts of his family and his photo hung at relatives’ houses, his niece said. His mother died in 2005 but never gave up hope that her son was alive and that he would be found.
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