It was the coldest of missing child cold cases: Luis Armando Albino was just 6-year-old when a woman lured him away from an Oakland, California, park in 1951. His older brother, Roger, described the woman who took him, bribed him away with candy, but despite an extensive search that involved local, state, and federal officials, the young Puerto Rican boy was never found.

But in 2020, Albino’s niece, 63-year-old Aida Alequin, took an online DNA test “just for fun” and matched closely with a man on the East Coast, the Associated Press said in a story based on reporting from the Bay Area News Group. Alequin said she reached out to the man at the time and never heard back.

Alequin and her daughters began looking again earlier this year, including a trip to the Oakland library to read stories about her uncle’s disappearance. There they saw photos of Luis and Roger, noting a distinct family resemblance with the man on the East Coast. They contacted law enforcement, which agreed that the new information was enough to reopen the missing person case.

In June, after taking DNA samples from the East Coast man and his sister, Alequin’s mother, investigators told the family it was a positive match. Luis Albino, missing for 73 years, had been found.

“We didn’t start crying until after the investigators left,” Alequin said. “I grabbed my mom’s hands and said, ‘We found him.’ I was ecstatic.”

Albino grew up with a couple who raised him as their own — family did not provide an exact location or name — where he served in Vietnam as a Marine and became a firefighter. He was a father and a grandfather.

With the help of the FBI, investigators brought Albino to Oakland on June 24 to meet his long lost family. His mother had died in 2005, but he met many of his lost family members, including brother Roger.

“They grabbed each other and had a really tight, long hug. They sat down and just talked,” Alequin said, adding that the two talked about the day Luis was kidnapped and their military service.

Albino went back home and returned in July for a longer visit, which turned out to be the last time he saw his brother before Roger died in August.

He didn’t want to talk to media, Alequin said, but she encouraged anyone else in such a situation to never give up hope.

“I was always determined to find him, and who knows, with my story out there, it could help other families going through the same thing,” she said. “I would say, don’t give up.”

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[Featured image: Roger and Luis as children, left, and during their meeting this summer before Roger’s death/family via KTVU]