What a crazy story.
It sounds like the man had a happy childhood but horrific for his family from whom he was kidnapped from.
DNA is finding out a lot of secrets
Happy ending, but … how on earth did no one ever question his identity? He was in the military. Wouldn’t he at some point have had to present proof of identity, like a birth certificate?
I think it was a zillion times easier to manufacture an identity for a kid then.
I didn’t get anything about his childhood out of this except that a couple who weren’t his real parents and most likely were aware this child was acquired illegally, raised him.
It is a crazy story, indeed! So many unanswered questions.
Only that the couple raised him as if he were their son.
I’m my mind, I’m hopeful that means that the childhood was a normal one.
Well as normal as it could be as he was kidnapped
I think that back then, many child placements were very informal, only formalized in court when the kid needed documentation. My original NYC birth certificate (1948) was filled out in handwriting. It may be that the parents who raised him didn’t know he had been kidnapped.
How many fictional TV shows feature people who assumed the identity of a child who died young?
I’m pretty certain that there were all sorts of supposedly legit “adoption agencies” which specialized in kidnapping kids to provide for couples who were willing to pay the fees.
What I don’t get is that a six year old is going to remember their parents and their siblings and, even if they were lied to and told that their family had died, they would have gone back to where they were from.
With a six year old? The adoptive parents would have had to know. A six year old would be constantly talking about their parents and be wanting to see them, as well as their brother. There was likely an extended family as well. What did the adoptive parents do when the kid wanted to talk with his grandparents, aunts and uncles, etc? The adoptive parents would have had to keep to some story that the kidnappers told the kid.
As six years old, most kids know their address and home phone number, so the adoptive parents would have had to actively discourage the kid from calling their home phone number, and they would have actively avoided looking up possible surviving members of the kid’s family, etc. The fact that the man didn’t look up his family as he got older means that the adoptive parents somehow convinced him that there was no use in doing that.
So yes, the adoptive parents were almost certainly complicit.
Totally agree. Unless the child had developmental disabilities and was behind the peers in development. Which doesn’t seem likely here.
Im sure thepeople who raised him knew the “adoption “ wasn’t on the up and up. It’s disgusting to do such a thing to another family, regardless of how you raised the child.
It’s possible this child was told his birth mother died, didn’t want him, would come for him later etc.
Didn’t read this article, though the kidnapped boy (and family) had recently moved to CA from Puerto Rico, and the boy did not speak English. We don’t know what happened, or what the adoptive parents knew. As the boy had only recently arrived in CA and didn’t know English, he may not have known his address and/or could not easily describe his situation to an adult who would listen.
ID was easy to fake back then - fake a birth certificate and go from there. While now someone could easily access missing persons reports from across the country, back then there would have been almost no way someone on the East Coast could figure out that this kid was taken from thousands of miles away.
I agree with everything you say, but even though we don’t know exactly what the people who raised this child knew, we can probably assume they knew this child was obtained by nefarious means.
That makes sense. The article I read did not have many details.
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