A six-year-old California boy who was kidnapped in an Oakland park by a woman who wanted to buy him candy has been found more than 70 years later.

Luis Armando Albino, who was kidnapped on February 21, 1951, is now a retired grandfather and Vietnam veteran. He was reunited with his family in June thanks to the persistence of his niece, Alida Alequin, now 63, who found her uncle on the East Coast after using an online DNA test, old newspaper records and family photos. The Mercury News reported.

Alequin’s first lead was the result of an online DNA test in 2020 that showed a 22 percent match with her uncle – not enough to be sure, but enough to investigate. Her initial attempts to contact him went unanswered.

Four years later, in February 2024, she and her daughters found several photos of the adult albino online and compared them with pictures of him as a child that they found in microfilm archives of the Oakland Tribune Newspaper.

The resemblance was so striking that when she reported her findings to Oakland police, a new missing person case was opened and the FBI and Department of Justice were called in. Police contacted Albino and asked him if he would be willing to take a DNA test.

After the results showed a match, the FBI helped Albino, along with members of his family, to Oakland to meet his niece Alequin, her mother and other relatives he didn’t know about. He was also able to meet his brother Roger, who was 10 years old when he was abducted – Roger died in August, but not before Albino paid him and other family members a second visit in July.

Albino’s mother, who died in 2005 at the age of 92, kept a “vigil of hope” for her son and reportedly visited the police missing persons office every year because she believed he was alive somewhere.

“I always knew I had an uncle,” Alequin said. “We talked about him a lot. My grandmother had the original article in her wallet and she always talked about him. There was always a picture of him in the family house.”

The woman who kidnapped Albino in 1951 – when he still couldn’t speak English after his family moved from Puerto Rico a year earlier – reportedly flew him to the East Coast, where he was eventually raised by a couple who raised him as their own son. The Mercury News reported.

The Oakland Police Department now considers the missing person case closed, but is continuing the investigation into the kidnapping together with the FBI.