The family came from São José do Cerrito, a small town in the Serra Catarinense highlands. Their mother died in Lages shortly after the youngest child was born. José was 13. The children scattered, and José went where the work was: Blumenau and Joinville, then the states of Paraná and São Paulo, then Itajaí. He finally settled in Florianópolis, where he met his wife. They have been married for 42 years.
Investigators under Abel Mantovani Bovi, head of the station, began cross-checking official databases, phone numbers and bank records. Within 48 hours they had mapped where his relatives lived. A week of daily phone calls followed.
For Jovelina, now 60, the calls brought news she had stopped expecting. Years earlier an uncle in Lages had told the family that José was dead, and she had believed it. She had only recently buried another brother. "Knowing he was alive gave me relief," she said.
On the afternoon of 9 September, José's 67th birthday, Jovelina travelled down from Balneário Camboriú, and Marta, 57, came from Navegantes. They met him at the station's headquarters.
Marta did not need the police records to know him. She looked at his hand. As a young man José had lost two fingertips to a machine at work, and she had kept that detail in her memory through six decades of separation. The shortened fingers told her this was her brother.
Finding his sisters on his birthday, José said, felt like a gift from God.
"I'm overjoyed," he added.
At the front desk, Adriana Ventura Silva was having a day of her own. She turned 57 that afternoon. It was also her wedding anniversary, and her eleventh year at the station where, a week earlier, a stranger had stopped on his way down the street and asked her to help him find his family.