So listen to this: this kid gets kidnapped, and they don't find him for 73 years. This is wild! So one day, two brothers are playing in a local park, and they're minding their own business, having a good time.
Then, out of nowhere, a woman wearing a green bandana approaches them, and she offers the younger brother some candy. The younger brother is like, "Sure, I want some candy! Who doesn't love candy?
" And the woman is like, "Well, come with me, and I'll take you to the store to get some. " So, the younger brother leaves with her to go to the store and get some candy, and that is the last time anyone ever saw him. Now the boy's name is Luise, and he's six, and the other boy with him in the park is his older brother, Roger.
Roger's 10, and when the woman starts to leave with Luise, Roger's like, "Well, I want to go too! I want some candy," and he starts to follow them. So he walks along, following them, but then after a while, he starts thinking, "Where are we going?
Something about this ain't right. " Now, keep in mind, this is happening in 1951, so this is way before "Stranger Danger," way before there were nationwide campaigns notifying kids not to get into cars with adults they don't know. And so, anyway, Roger feels like something isn't right, and he decides, "This is weird; I'm telling my mom.
" So he stops following them, and he runs home. Minutes later, he's home, and he tells his mom—now his mom is this woman who we'll just call "Mom"—and he tells her what happened: that his little brother just left with some woman in a green bandana offering candy. Of course, Mom freaks the hell out, and boom!
She runs back to the park to see if she can find Luise. But unfortunately, there's no trace of him or the strange woman anywhere; they are gone. Pretty quickly, Mom goes to the police, and this is a whole hurdle to get them involved because she doesn't speak English.
She and the boys just recently immigrated to California from Puerto Rico. But after they cross the language barrier, the police get involved, and this huge nine-block search gets underway. Soldiers from a local army base help out, and they start looking.
The Coast Guard helps by searching the Bay Area nearby. The story makes the news locally, and that gets it a little attention there, but still, there's no sign of little Luise. Of course, Mom is destroyed by all this, but there's not much else she can do, and this is during a time when there are no Amber Alerts, no surveillance cameras, no missing children computer database; all they have is a 10-year-old's description of what happened that day.
So every day, Mom goes to the police station to see if there are any updates, hoping that they'll have something. Every day, she gets the same answer: no news, no leads, no Luise. Years pass, and Mom stops coming every day; she just comes once a week.
Eventually, that turns into her coming once a month, and as more time passes, she starts to only come to the police station once a year. At this point, officers know her so well that she'll just walk into the station without saying a word, and they'll look at her and just shake their heads, and she'll know that that means they have no updates for her. But despite that, Mom never stops believing that her son is still alive, and she never gives up hope—ever.
So then, I guess you have to ask: what happened to Luise? Well, obviously, he was kidnapped, and we don't know a ton of the details of this part. Like, we know he was taken from the park; we know he and the woman got on a plane, and that they flew from California to somewhere on the East Coast.
We don't exactly know where, and we know that then somehow, Luise ends up getting adopted by a couple, and that couple raises him as their own. Luise knows he was adopted, but he doesn't know he was originally stolen. But anyway, from there he lives a fairly normal life.
Like, he grows up; he later joins the Marines; he goes and fights in the Vietnam War. He comes back, and then he goes and fights in the Vietnam War a second time. Eventually, he comes back for good and becomes a firefighter.
He gets married; he has kids of his own. Meanwhile, Mom, on the opposite side of the country, she still hasn't given up hope. Like, she still goes to the police station about once a year to see if there are any updates—and there aren't.
Even so, she continues to keep Baby Luise's photo in the house, and she keeps a newspaper clipping about his abduction in her wallet at all times. So, decades pass—54 years after Luise first went missing, it's 2005. At this point, Mom is 92 years old, and sadly, she passed away never having found her son.
So, any hope of Luise ever being located or reunited with his original family is just gone until more time passes, and it's now 2020. That is when we meet this woman; her name's Alita. Alita's 63, and one day, just for fun, she decides to take one of those ancestry DNA tests through the mail.
So, she takes it, and she gets the results back, and—wow, that's weird! She's a match with some man she doesn't recognize. Not only that, the results say that she shares 22% DNA with this guy, and so she's thinking, "Oh, this must be like a cousin.
" Or an uncle or something, and so she sends this mystery guy a little message because you can like message each other through the site. Then she waits, and she waits, and she waits, and the mystery guy never replies. So she's like, "All right, whatever," and she moves on.
Four years go by, and one night she’s watching some documentary on TV, and this reminds her somehow of that random unknown man that she shares DNA with. So she decides to give it another shot, dig a little deeper, and figure out just who this guy is. She starts looking up his name online, and she comes across some pictures of him, and the guy is, of course, Louise.
Now, Alita had heard all her life about an uncle she has who went missing when he was six years old. I mean, the family has always talked about him. So she’s looking at these pictures of adult Louise on the internet, going, "Could this be him, that uncle?
" She starts comparing them to childhood photos she has of her uncle, and she’s like, "Yeah, I think that’s him. " So eventually, she goes to the police, and she’s like, "Oh, you have to look into this. I think this guy was my uncle who was kidnapped literally back in 1951.
" The police can't believe it, and they actually do agree to help, as the case was never solved. So they open it back up, and then they get the FBI involved, and then the California Department of Justice joins in. After a bit of investigating, the FBI tracks Louise down, and he lives somewhere on the East Coast.
So I guess the FBI goes to him and they’re like, "Uh, we think you might be this kid who was kidnapped back in 1951. " And Louise is like, "I was kidnapped? " See, 'cause he still didn't even know; he thought he had been legitimately adopted.
They convince him to take a DNA test just to be sure, and of course, it turns out that his DNA is a match with Alita and the remaining members of his family. So now, after 73 years—73 years—he finally flies from the East Coast back to Oakland, California, to meet his biological family. A man reunited with his family 70 years after being abducted, after he was found through a voluntary DNA swab test.
Now, keep in mind, most of these family members he's either never met or he just doesn't remember. But one person he does remember is his brother, Roger, whom he reunites with. This is a picture of the two of them: that’s Louise on the right and Roger on the left.
So then, after all that, who was responsible for this kidnapping? Well, unfortunately, that's a tough one because 70 years have gone by, and we don't know who the woman in the green bandana was. Louise was six years old, so he doesn't remember too many details of it, and his adoptive parents aren't even alive anymore.
So honestly, I don't know if we'll ever know.
