Vets reunited 73 years after kidnapping
Hard to believe this one. A young lad of 6, Luis Armando Albino, was kidnapped from the Oakland CA park in which he was playing with his brother and never found.
Albino and five of his siblings, brought by their mother from Puerto Rico, had just moved to Oakland the summer before his abduction in February 1951.
He was playing with his 10-year-old brother, Roger, at Jefferson Square Park at 7th Street and what is now Martin Luther King Jr. Way near the family’s home when a woman lured him away by promising to buy him candy, according to coverage by the Oakland Tribune at the time.
The woman flew him to the East Coast, where he eventually wound up living with another family who raised him as their son.
Cut to 2020. Albino’s niece, Alida Alequin, 63, took a DNA test, and among other info got a partial DNA match with a fellow across he country.
She said that Albino’s mother, Antonia, had always thought about Albino up until her death in 2005. She kept a newspaper clipping of the article about his kidnapping in her wallet, and a photo of Albino hung in the living room, Alequin said.
“She always had hope that he would come home,” Alequin told The Times.
Earlier this year while reminiscing about the family with her daughters, Alequin had a spark of inspiration: “I started to name all my mom’s siblings, and when I got to the youngest, Luis, the baby, I paused in the middle of the sentence. I can’t explain what I felt but I said, ‘I don’t think this person I found on Ancestry was some half-brother like I first thought. I think he was the brother that was kidnapped.’ “
She persuaded the police to look into it, and eventually tracked Albino down on the East Coast, who provided a DNA sample which confirmed that he was indeed the long lost brother.
When Albino reunited with his family in California, “it was a lot of long tight hugs and tears, and then we sat down and we just talked,” Alequin said.
Albino and his brother Roger, who had been there the day he was kidnapped, bonded over their experience in the military, Roger having been an Air Force veteran. They spoke about their childhood, and their lives after the abduction, she said.
Albino is a retired firefighter and Marine Corps veteran who served two tours of duty in Vietnam, and himself a father and grandfather, according to his niece, Alida Alequin, a 63-year-old Oakland resident who found Albino and reunited him with his family. L.A. Times
Sadly, Roger passed away this summer not long after they met. Albino has another trip West to see his “new” family planned.
73 years.
