A California Boy Was Kidnapped from a Park in 1951. He's Just Been Found Alive (sfgate.com)
- Reference: 0175106295
- News link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/24/09/22/178217/a-california-boy-was-kidnapped-from-a-park-in-1951-hes-just-been-found-alive
- Source link: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/bay-area-boy-kidnapped-park-found-alive-19784249.php
> A boy who was kidnapped from an Oakland playground in 1951 has been [2]found alive on the East Coast , a remarkable resolution to a mystery that has haunted his family for over half a century.
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> On February 21, 1951, 6-year-old Luis Armando Albino was playing with his older brother Roger at Jefferson Square Park. The boys had recently immigrated with their mother and four other siblings from Puerto Rico... That afternoon, Luis and 10-year-old Roger walked down the block from their home at 730 Brush Street to play in the park. They were approached by a woman in her 30s, wearing a green bandana over her hair, who began chatting with Luis in Spanish. She promised she would buy him candy if he came along with her, and little Luis agreed to join her. Wary, Roger trailed the pair for a while before returning home to alert an adult to the strange encounter. Oakland police were called by frantic family members and a search was immediately launched...
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> Antonia [the boy's mother] was convinced her son was alive. "She came once a week, then once a month, then at least once a year, to see the shake of the head, to have the answer 'no' translated for her although she could read it in the officers' faces," the Oakland Tribune wrote in 1966...
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> Decades passed.
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> In 2020, Luis' niece, Alida Alequin, took a DNA test on a whim, the Mercury News reported. The service returned several possible family members to the Oakland woman. One of them was a man who Alequin had never met. After some internet sleuthing, she began to suspect this man might be the missing uncle she'd heard so much about. She reached out to the man but didn't hear back.
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> Earlier this year, Alequin tried again. Armed with photos, she took her evidence to the Oakland Police Department's missing persons unit. In short order, the FBI and California Department of Justice were also investigating Alequin's lead. They discovered the man was living on the East Coast, had worked as a firefighter and served two tours in Vietnam with the Marine Corps. This week, the [3]Mercury News first reported that a DNA test confirmed what Alequin suspected: This was Luis Albino.
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> In June, Luis flew to California to reunite with his family, among them his devoted brother Roger... For over 70 years, he lived on the East Coast believing he was the son of another couple....
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> When Luis met Alequin for the first time this summer, he held her in an embrace. "Thank you," he said, "for finding me."
[1] https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/bay-area-boy-kidnapped-park-found-alive-19784249.php
[2] https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/09/20/oakland-boy-kidnapped-1951-found-alive-new-york/
[3] https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/09/20/oakland-boy-kidnapped-1951-found-alive-new-york/
no means no (Score:2)
in spanish too
You don't 'immigrate' from Puerto Rico to CA (Score:3, Informative)
You move.
Life is Stranger Than... (Score:2)
... [Spoiler Alert!] [1]True Detective Season 3 [wikipedia.org] fiction.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Detective_season_3
Thank you (Score:5, Insightful)
For sharing such a heart warming story in these miserable times. I don't care it is not about tech, we just dont get enough positive news these days.
Re: Thank you (Score:3, Insightful)
Agree. I have been following Fix The News for just that reason: [1]https://fixthenews.com/ [fixthenews.com]
[1] https://fixthenews.com/
Re: (Score:3)
Positive news doesn't sell. Negative news gets far more attention, clicks, ad revenue, and potential to motivate action. Making people good and mad is a very powerful political tool, as well.
There's no "these days" about it. The emphasis on negative news has been around ever since there was news.
Incidentally, too much of it absolutely does skew your perception of reality. It's normal for people to believe that their neighborhoods and the world in general is much more dangerous than it is. Every strange
A 6 year old just shrugged and switched families? (Score:4, Interesting)
The article misses to ask about the elephant in the room: Why would a 6 year old child not attempt to contact or return to his former family? It seems highly unlikely that he just "forgot" he had a different family before the "candy"-incident. Either the story is complete BS or there was good reason for the child to not miss his original family, and the article just does not want to talk about any non-wholesome circumstances.
Re: (Score:3)
Biographical memory is much more malleable than most people realize. Human memory is not like a hard drive where you put bits of data into it and then retrieve them later unchanged. Human biographical recall is more like reimagining of things that happened to you in the past. It's like your brain has a kind of schema for what happened, but your mind's eye fills in the details. That makes it very easy to add and delete details, and every time you recall a memory the schema changes a little bit. One neuros
Re: A 6 year old just shrugged and switched famili (Score:2)
Good answer, but that's not what gaslighting is. Extremely common mistake but it's making someone believe they're going crazy, not trying l tricking them or lying to them.
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In the 1950s kids didn't have cell phones or the internet. He might not have known mother's telephone number or postal address. The people who kidnapped him may not have allowed him access to telephones or postage stamps. They may have kept him away from other people and means of communication until he came to think of his new family as his family and forgot about his original family.
Re: (Score:2)
Or maybe he liked his new family better.
Re: A 6 year old just shrugged and switched famili (Score:2)
Kids dont forget that sort of thing. The details maybe, but not the main facts.
Re: A 6 year old just shrugged and switched famili (Score:4, Informative)
Kids kidnapped at age 8 or under stop trying to return home pretty quickly, coming to accept stories for their new living situation and losing details of their old one.
And memories are malleable. I have few memories before age 8, and the ones I do have e.g. older and more familiar versions of my parents copy-and-pasted in. I am often surprised looking at old photos.
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> In the 1950s kids didn't have cell phones or the internet. He might not have known mother's telephone number or postal address.
When I was 6 years old, there also were no cell phones or the Internet. But I can still recite the number of my parent's land-line from back then (despite it having been obsolete for > 40 years), and of course I knew the name of the city and the name of the street and the number of the house we lived in, even the license-plate number of the car my father drove back then.
Sure the child may have been hindered to contact his family by the abductors for some time, but he certainly had plenty of opportunity
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> When I was 6 years old, there also were no cell phones or the Internet. But I can still recite the number of my parent's land-line from back then (despite it having been obsolete for > 40 years), and of course I knew the name of the city and the name of the street and the number of the house we lived in, even the license-plate number of the car my father drove back then.
> Sure the child may have been hindered to contact his family by the abductors for some time, but he certainly had plenty of opportunity t
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Were you a small child in the early 1950s? This kid had only just moved to California and might well not yet have learned his phone number and address. He also didn't speak English, meaning that in the initial phase of his kidnapping, he might not have been able to communicate with people he came in contact with. Kids separated from their family at that age may have vague memories but they fade as time goes on and if their situation is not unpleasant, they may lose motivation to try to regain contact with t
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It was 1951 and he was from Puerto Rico. Kids in 1951 were not as smart as the kids of today. It's thanks to technologies such as, radio, TV, telephone, computers, internet, mobile phone etc. that today's kids are much smarter than kids of the past. Luis probably never ever saw any of those devices before he was kidnapped.
Re: A 6 year old just shrugged and switched famili (Score:2)
Smart is the wrong word. It's unlikely intelligence has changed. What can be done with that intelligence has, though.
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In the 90's, I was living in a rural area. I saw little girl walking down the street and I thought that odd. So I went to talk to her, I stooped so we were eye level, hopefully not to scare her. I asked her where she lived, it was right next door. I asked her what her phone number was so I could at least call them first. She didn't know. I finally wound up walking her back home but before we left the road, her mother pulled up. The kid had been left off the school bus and finding no one home decided to go w
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Maybe it was "Your parents have asked me to take care of you for a while because they are going through an extreme difficulty(?) and didn't want you to suffer with them. But don't worry, they will reunite with you once the crisis(?) has passed". Years later followed up with "Your parents died". Yes, I'm having extreme difficulty trying to patch the hole you can drive a MACK truck through in this story with a somewhat plausable theory.
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Or maybe even just telling him "Your parents were sadly killed in a car accident" right away.
I don't see that as a hole at all.
No explanation what the woman did with him? (Score:3)
Granted this is definitely not slashdot material it is an interesting story So, Luis has no memory of who took him (age 6 isnt so young he wouldn't have any memory) and transferred him to another couple for raising? Furthermore, the couple that raised him had no relatives to explain where they got Luis?
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I don't quite believe that a 6 year old could be brainwashed into forgetting who his parents are and believing he spent his entire life with the people who just kidnapped him. Or if he can, then I don't see how he could so easily reverse his beliefs and remember his real family at age 80. Something doesn't seem to add up? Well, OTOH it appears that that's exactly what happened here.
Re: No explanation what the woman did with him? (Score:2)
From an article in the latimes: âoe Alequin said that her uncle had some memories of the abduction and his trip to the East Coast, but when he questioned adults in his life, they did not give him answers. Albino wants to keep some of his experiences private and didnâ(TM)t want to speak to the media, she saidâ
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The guy was found after his mom died, but just before his brother died, so I guess that's good. But he's lived the majority of his life without his blood family and seemingly had a decent life and there's no way to get that back which is a mix of good and bad.
You know what pisses me off? Somebody took somebody else's 6 year old and we have absolutely no indication that the law is coming down on them in any way. Or that they're dead and the law can't. This is a huge, huge missing part of the story and t
He didnâ(TM)t immigrate (Score:1)
Puerto Ricans or US citizens. When he moved from Puerto Rico to California, he did not immigrate he just moved. Itâ(TM)s a technicality, but itâ(TM)s somewhat important one that an editor should have caught.
Not tech, so it does not belong on Slashdot. (Score:2)
Turning Slashdot into a tabloid is contemptible. Yet another calculated step in wrecking the site the "editors" will never admit taking for that reason.
"Immigrated" is definitely the wrong word (Score:2)
> The boys had recently immigrated with their mother and four other siblings from Puerto Rico.
You don't say people "immigrate" to California from Arizona, or Virginia, or Alsaka, or Puerto Rico, or any other part of the US.
They just move there.
to have the answer 'no' translated (Score:2)
That is, "no"
How did he get a new Identity? (Score:2)
Birth certificate, social security number?
Re: (Score:2)
Back in those days, kids didn't get SSNs. Birth certificates were not carefully tracked either. So obtaining one from a kid that died young would not have been a major problem. "Recently immigrated from Puerto Rico" would have made tracking even more difficult.
Just Wait... (Score:2)
...for the California State Board of Equalization (their form of IRS) gets their hands on this guy and sends him a BIGLY bill for all the back taxes he owes the State.
After all, it is California, and they are having budgetary shortfall problem again, and they are never ones to overlook an opportunity to tax you coming & going.
Just wait for the entry & exit barriers to be erected at all California airports, complete with armed guards, and a sign saying:
Pay Your State Taxes Here ... Even If You Are '
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Propaganda for DNA? DNA exists!
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> Propaganda for DNA? DNA exists!
DNA Aren't Real!
/j <-- added for the exceptionally slow-witted
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> Is this subtle propaganda for DNA after negative publicity lately?
Fight Big DNA and its propaganda! Join the 80% of Americans who support [1]mandatory labeling [washingtonpost.com] on foods containing DNA!
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/01/17/over-80-percent-of-americans-support-mandatory-labels-on-foods-containing-dna/
Re: (Score:3)
"This product contains deoxyribonucleic acid which is known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm."
Re: (Score:2)
Sounds like the push to ban dihydrogen monoxide.
And also explains a lot of the pushback against GMO.
It isn't that GMO is dangerous, it's that people have convinced others, into a circular feeding frenzy, that it is, with basically zero evidence. It's mostly distrust of the corporations these days.
Me, I realize that just analyzing the food for dangerous substances would be easier, and they already just spray most of them on. GMO tends to reduce the need for those sprays.
Re: (Score:1)
Slow life? You're a whiny bitch
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> Is this subtle propaganda for DNA after [1]negative publicity lately [slashdot.org]?
Probably. Although I would not call it "subtle".
[1] https://science.slashdot.org/story/24/09/13/2152229/23andme-to-pay-30-million-in-genetics-data-breach-settlement