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.
The article was a bit frustrating because it said nothing about what the man’s thoughts were after being abducted and now. Does he even remember being abducted? Did he realize he wasn’t living with his birth parents?
Everything I could find online says he did not want an interview and that it’s not confirmed if the person who raised him was the same who kidnapped him. It only mentions that the adults in his life did not answer any questions he had about it. We likely won’t know unless he decides to do an interview or the FBI’s investigation turns up something.
Oakland police acknowledged that Alequin’s efforts “played an integral role in finding her uncle” and that “the outcome of this story is what we strive for”.
That’s a really weird statement. Oaklands police strives for no leads and a cold case for 70 years, leaving the mother in uncertainty until her death and then the family finding the missing person themselves?
I mean its great, that he was found well and alive, but if that is what your police strives for… the bar is like underground.
It’s not all that weird when you remember that ACAB.
Aren’t police clearance rates for missing persons and murder cases like, in the low single digits? Cops aren’t good at this.
It’s like 1-2% for pretty much any crime. They’re basically there because you need a police report to make an insurance claim.
Yeah, I’ve heard about the same. Roughly 2% even for violent crime. And yet revisiting their budgets is apparently fucking communism.
Cops aren’t good at this.
They’re not magically omniscient, if that’s what you mean. You’ve set a really high bar for American cops, who are continually accused of being violent and stupid.
The bar isn’t really that high if you look at how cases that are solved actually got solved (deductive reasoning, forensic analysis, trust from the community including the marginalized, and focused manpower from people who give a fuck).
It’s just that the people who want to be cops are more interested in wearing a fancy uniform, using weapons, harassing poor people, and beating their spouses than actually doing real work that involves brain power. Not to mention office politics.
Magic omniscience would probably help though. They should work on that after solving the “violent and stupid” issue. ;)
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.
That’s disgusting, I hope that woman lived a short, painful and miserable life.
And I hope the couple who adopted him gave him love. (It doesn’t say whether they knew he’d been stolen, they lived on the opposite coast so it wouldn’t have been in their newspaper.) Glad he and his brother were able to reconnect, after all the lost decades
This story is frustratingly light on details. What happened to the woman who took him? How did he end up with his adoptive parents (did they legally adopt him from that woman or did they adopt him after she abandoned him)? Did he know he was adopted?
Did he ultimately get the candy or not?
