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Biotech

A California Boy Was Kidnapped from a Park in 1951. He's Just Been Found Alive (sfgate.com) 132

An anonymous reader shared this story from SFGate: A boy who was kidnapped from an Oakland playground in 1951 has been found alive on the East Coast, a remarkable resolution to a mystery that has haunted his family for over half a century.

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...

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...

Decades passed.

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.

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 Mercury News first reported that a DNA test confirmed what Alequin suspected: This was Luis Albino.

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....

When Luis met Alequin for the first time this summer, he held her in an embrace. "Thank you," he said, "for finding me."

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A California Boy Was Kidnapped from a Park in 1951. He's Just Been Found Alive

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  • in spanish too
  • by Valgrus Thunderaxe ( 8769977 ) on Sunday September 22, 2024 @01:09PM (#64807983)
    You move.
    • "You don't immigrate from Puerto Rico." I was going to say the same thing, but you already have it covered. Puerto Rico is a US territory, and Puerto Ricans are American citizens.

      The quoted SFGate article now says "moved" instead of "immigrated", so they must have received pushback on that also.

    • by dbialac ( 320955 )
      You move and you are a citizen, but you still have a responsibility to adapt to the culture you're moving to.
  • ... [Spoiler Alert!] True Detective Season 3 [wikipedia.org] fiction.

  • Thank you (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mustafap ( 452510 ) on Sunday September 22, 2024 @01:18PM (#64807995) Homepage

    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:4, Insightful)

      by djo26 ( 1466671 ) on Sunday September 22, 2024 @02:51PM (#64808159)
      Agree. I have been following Fix The News for just that reason: https://fixthenews.com/ [fixthenews.com]
    • by Brain-Fu ( 1274756 ) on Sunday September 22, 2024 @02:57PM (#64808179) Homepage Journal

      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 stranger they see looks like a thief or murderer or rapist in disguise. When 99% of them are just normal people reading news and just as scared.

      Too much news can straight-up cause depression, too.

      Some of us like to think of ourselves as worldly and educated for staying informed of current events. And maybe we are. But we are also drinking a daily dose of mental poison in the process.

      • Hence the old saying "If it bleeds it leads" that's been used to describe this idea for decades. I'm not surprised by the rest of your post either and while I suspect it has been studied, I'm inclined to say that it's true from anecdotal evidence. Some of the most upset/miserable people I know are the ones glued to the news and it's true regardless of political persuasion. I've certainly been sucked in at times myself.
      • by skam240 ( 789197 ) on Monday September 23, 2024 @06:17AM (#64809165)

        This shows itself in the disconnect between crime rates and people's perceptions of crime. Quite a lot of people honestly believe things are more dangerous in terms of crime today than when they were kids when it is in fact significantly safer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] . Likewise people who watch certain news channels think migrant crime is a major problem for our country when migrants commit far less crime than native born Americans and always have https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.10... [pnas.org] , https://www.kpbs.org/news/bord... [kpbs.org]

        • Maybe historically or when you average it out, but it was only a couple months ago that NYPD said around %75 of violent crime arrest are migrants. Should we wait till the average rises?
          • by skam240 ( 789197 )

            For starters, as is common with people who don't support their claims with citation, you've got your claim wrong https://www.fairus.org/blog/20... [fairus.org]. and how you got it wrong exaggerated what you seem to want to be saying.

            Second, that's one city's crime statistics, they don't make the crime statistics for the entire country just magically go away. The nation wide crime statistics are still what they are and they are low for immigrants, as cited above.

    • by linuxguy ( 98493 )

      It is mostly a positive story. I feel bad for the mother. She died in 2005. Well before the lost son was found.

  • by ffkom ( 3519199 ) on Sunday September 22, 2024 @01:20PM (#64808003)
    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.
    • 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.
      • Or maybe he liked his new family better.

      • Kids dont forget that sort of thing. The details maybe, but not the main facts.

        • by mlyle ( 148697 ) on Sunday September 22, 2024 @02:46PM (#64808139)

          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.

        • How many children have you kidnapped and tested this theory on?
        • by GFS666 ( 6452674 ) on Sunday September 22, 2024 @07:04PM (#64808555)

          Kids dont forget that sort of thing. The details maybe, but not the main facts.

          Uhmmm..No. No disrespect intended, but you are completely incorrect. My Mother left my Father when I was 7. She took all the kids except for me and left me with my Father. It was literally the most earth shattering thing that ever happened in my life and has always affected me. I have no memory of when she and my siblings left and the days that followed. My first memory afterwards is being in my Father's truck at night, listening to the radio as he and a friend worked on the mobile home trailer.

          Children's brains are incredible pieces of engineering that works to protect the child from life threatening mental incidents and part of that defense mechanism is just making them forget. Which is what happened to me.

          • by Viol8 ( 599362 )

            Well I haven't forgotten any of my fathers alcoholic behaviour when I was 4 and 5 so perhaps I just have a better memory than most.

          • Children's brains are incredible pieces of engineering that works to protect the child from life threatening mental incidents and part of that defense mechanism is just making them forget. Which is what happened to me.

            Many people can not remember much of their childhood before they were 8 or so... and yet, somehow or another, I can remember everything back to my second birthday. I can even remember remembering my first birthday on my second birthday despite my first birthday being lost to the mists of time now. Seeing two candles and remembering one candle being on the cake previously made me think about how long I would have to wait for a third candle or a fourth. Eight candles was going to be literally forever. Now, I

        • by jd ( 1658 )

          There are so many psychology studies on the mutability of memory at this point that I don't need to point out how wrong you are.

      • by ffkom ( 3519199 )

        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

        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          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

          • I agre e with what you said, but "Stranger Danger" was very much taught from the early 1970s onward. In 1951, perhaps not.
        • 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
        • The boys had recently immigrated with their mother and four other siblings from Puerto Rico

          So the numbers and address that he knew as a 6yo where most likely not the current one.

        • by Hodr ( 219920 )

          Maybe you missed the part where it said they RECENTLY MOVED from Puerto Rico. Do you think they kept the same phone number and address?

        • by tragedy ( 27079 )

          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.

          You're confusing different kinds of memory. Remembering phone numbers and addresses long-term is semantic memory. The kind of memory in question here is biographical memory. They are different and develop differently at different ages. Imagine if you could remember those numbers and addresses, but had no context for them. That's what happens if your biographical memory is altered. The semantic memories effectively have no anchor point.

      • In the 1950s a lot of people didn't even have a phone. In the 1970s a lot of people shared a single line and were supposed to pick up the receiver based on a morse-like ring pattern.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by nikkipolya ( 718326 )

      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.

      • Smart is the wrong word. It's unlikely intelligence has changed. What can be done with that intelligence has, though.
        • That is actually currently unknown, all we know is that the results of IQ tests keep on increasing and the reason for it is under heavy debate so no way to speak one way or another.
          • by Hodr ( 219920 )

            The progress was almost entirely in areas where poor nutrition and lack of education impacted scores in the 19th century. In fact, within the US there has been a decline since the 1990s so it's entirely possible that scores are similar or below what they were in the 1950s.

            And on top of this, there have been changes over the years to "adjust" IQ scores according to meet other than strictly scientific goals. You can Google if you want to learn more about that, i'm not looking to start any food fights here.

    • by gtall ( 79522 )

      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

      • well you know what you use, and if you are not very often calling your own home or if this even can be done easily by asking people to "call my home" instead of repeating the actual number then it is hard to remember it. Heck I struggle to remember my own cell phone number since I never use it.
      • by Askmum ( 1038780 )
        Children don't remember that. Children have tags, armbands or necklaces with vital information if their parents think of it. They don't have that in their brains if they're not ready for that (sure, at varying age they do know).
    • 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.
      • 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.

      • by tragedy ( 27079 )

        I find it disturbing that people have that much unfounded confidence in the solidity of human memory that they think this is a hole in the story. This story, where an abducted child ends up accepting their situation and their old life just fades away has repeated so many times. It's inconceivable by now that anyone finds it surprising. Cases where young abducted children hang on to their old lives and escape back to it at the first opportunity are extremely rare. They also seem to only happen very early on

      • Easier: I am your real mother and I love you very much, see all those candies?

    • Well I mean, some people get adopted at 6 and forget. And 6 year olds tend to accept new information, since so much is new to them. Also some of them don't understand that adults can lie, nor understand the concept that they might lie about something like this.

      If he had been prepped with "we're going to have a new life after we move", and then the kidnappers are telling him "This is your home now, we're you're parents," and everyone new he meets is acting like that's the case (because they think it is), a
    • in the linked news article:
      The abducted boy "had some memories of the kidnapping and his trip across the country, but the adults in his life never answered his questions."

      At that age, I'm not confident I could have done any better.

    • by tragedy ( 27079 )

      People have way too much confidence in memory. How much do you honestly remember from when you were six? Also, a lot of memory is reconstruction. We don't remember what actually happened, we reconstruct it from cues and biases and remember what we think probably happened as what actually happened. Pretty much every experiment on eyewitnesses, for example, has demonstrated that eyewitness testimony is mostly useless. Too many people who weren't even there report having seen events because they heard about th

    • 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

      I challenge you to distinctly remember times from that age. Actively challenge you. Of course they will try and contact or return to the former family... for a while. But after a while you give up. As an adult you've got fuck all chance of distinctly remembering before the age of 6 wildly different details under from your "normal" upbringing.

      The third option you are missing: You have not idea how brains develop, how children learn behaviours, and at what point they develop strong willpower and resistance to

    • by jpatters ( 883 )

      Why didn't the six year old in 1951 just pick up a smartphone and google where his real parents live!

    • You fail to undertand how malleable human memory truly is:

      " Eyewitness Testimony [softdevlabs.com]", by Elizabeth F. Loftus [wikipedia.org]

      "Introducing Nonexistent Objects:" . . .

      "In addition to the laboratory studies, demonstrations outside the laboratory have uncovered the same phenomenon at work. For example, some years ago during a course on cognitive Psychology I gave my students the following assignment: I told them to go out and create in someone's mind a "memory" for something that did not exist. My hope was that they woul

  • by blahbooboo ( 839709 ) on Sunday September 22, 2024 @01:21PM (#64808005)
    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?
    • 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.
      • 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
      • by jd ( 1658 )

        There are so many studies on the ease of creating false memory that belief has nothing to do with it.

    • 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

      • by keltor ( 99721 ) *
        This gentleman is 79 and was abducted by a woman "in her 30s" which means 20s-50s, so she would be between 99 and 129. The average life expectancy for women born in 1925 was 61 years old. For women born in 1895, it was only 46 (childbirth). The chance of her being alive are zero.
        • Well there's a massive reading fail for me; I had it in my head he was in his late 50s. The 'retired' part didn't click because his career as a firefighter often comes with an early retirement.

        • by Askmum ( 1038780 )
          The woman was "in her 30s" in 1956. That means a birth date of 1926 or before, indeed making her at least about 100 years old now. Saying there is 0 chance of her being alive is refuting public data that there are about 90,000 people of 100 years of older in the US.
          The chance is not 0. It is very low, but not 0.
          Also, life expectancy at birth is not life expectancy at 30. When you reach 30, you have a lot bigger change to live to 100 than when you're just born.
    • age 6 isnt so young he wouldn't have any memory

      Of course he would have memory. But what do you actually remember? Only things re-enforced repeatedly over time. What starts of as a kidnapping over time changes to an encounter with a stranger culminating in returning home to the family with a vague memory of different people before then. Over time further your memory of those people change, you remember doing things with your family before the kidnapping, but can't remember they were different from the family you know.

      My earliest childhood memory that I c

  • 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.
  • Turning Slashdot into a tabloid is contemptible. Yet another calculated step in wrecking the site the "editors" will never admit taking for that reason.

    • I'd argue that DNA analysis indeed qualifies as "tech."

  • 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.

    • by keltor ( 99721 ) *
      Both Merriam-Webster AND American Heritage do not limit the term "immigrate" to just countries:

      M-W: to enter and usually become established
      AH: To enter and settle in a country or region to which one is not native.

      So M-W uses it in the most vague of terms and AH uses region in addition to country. There's tons of usage of the term immigrate to discuss the Western migration of people from the East Coast of the US as well as the post Civil War migrations of people from the Southern US to the Northern US. It
      • by pezpunk ( 205653 )

        Great job being an annoying pedant in service to racism. You manage to be insufferably annoying while defending bigotry, two strikes for the price of one! Perfect hill for someone like you to die on.

  • Birth certificate, social security number?
    • by PPH ( 736903 )

      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.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Baron_Yam ( 643147 )

        > "Recently immigrated from Puerto Rico" would have made tracking even more difficult.

        I mean... even today lots of Americans don't realize Puerto Ricans are Americans and can't actually 'immigrate'. Movement within the US is 'migrating' and to the average Joe, 'moving'.

        So back in the day, I can't imagine it was better.

        • by PPH ( 736903 )

          Right. But the issue is less the immigration or migration and more the state of record keeping in Puerto Rico. In 1945, there were backwater places in the continental USA that didn't keep good birth records.

  • ...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 '

  • But this story illustrates an important *positive* use case for DNA testing. This was a consumer-grade test that led to solving a decades-old kidnapping. All indications are that DNA is far more often used for *good* purposes than bad.

    • >"But this story illustrates an important *positive* use case for DNA testing. This was a consumer-grade test that led to solving a decades-old kidnapping. All indications are that DNA is far more often used for *good* purposes than bad."

      There is a huge incentive not to disclose or share what might be done that is bad. Plus, one of the most major bad things is that this data hangs around FOREVER once it is taken, and can be used for bad things way into the future.

      Like most technological advancements, th

      • All the "bad" things I've heard or read about related to DNA profiles, have been theoretical dystopian horror daydreams, not reality. Laws have already banned things like insurance use of DNA for purposes of setting premiums or denying coverage. Police have to get a warrant to collect DNA for suspect who has not already been arrested.

        If you're worried about your DNA being used to track you, it's already too late. They don't need *your* DNA to find you, they just need DNA from a relative as distant as a thir

      • by jd ( 1658 )

        FTDNA is pretty anonymous, and they're one of the older companies.

    • by jd ( 1658 )

      My observation is that the good tends to come from the tech, the bad (eg: uBiome committing forgery and theft, 23&Me security failings) is attitude, negligence, and incompetence.

      Simply enforce minimum standards in tech, from the ground up, and the companies should never get to the point of their failings resulting in unmitigated disaster.

      • I agree with your observations.

        It's significant that the uBiome incident was not targeted at individuals who had taken DNA tests, but rather, the company had committed securities fraud in a scheme to make money.

        In the 23andMe case, hackers weren't interested in the DNA per se, but in the metadata held in 23andMe records. Though it's true that some of that stolen metadata was derived from DNA tests, it's the kind of metadata that can be obtained through other types of breaches not involving DNA tests.

        The poi

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