HARTFORD, Connecticut (AP) – Politicians long ago discovered the uses of Facebook. East Haven Mayor April Capone Almon found something else there: A constituent who needed her kidney.

Capone Almon, 35, had more than 1,600 “friends” on Facebook last year when she saw one of them, Carlos Sanchez, post a status update saying his friends and relatives had all been tested and couldn’t donate a kidney.

She knew him casually through activities and friends in the New Haven suburb of East Haven, but they weren’t so close that she had heard he was ill.

Sanchez, a 44-year-old father whose kidneys were failing because of diabetes, sent out the request on Facebook only hesitantly and on his doctor’s suggestion. He worried people might pity him — and certainly hadn’t pinned his hopes on finding a donor that way.

He didn’t have long to wait. Capone Almon was the first person to respond.

“I sent him a private message and just said, ‘Hey, I’ll try. I’ll get tested,’” Capone Almon said Wednesday. “I really felt from the very beginning that I was going to be a match and a donor. I don’t know why, but I just knew it.”

Sanchez had no such certainty.

“I thought she was joking. The mayor of East Haven would offer me her kidney?” said Sanchez, an office administrator. “She responded back and said, ‘I am serious, I am willing to get tested.’

“I wasn’t putting too much faith in it,” he said. “I didn’t want to get my hopes high. But at a point she made me feel so comfortable that I started feeling maybe this was meant to be.”

Capone Almon, a Democrat, was running for second term as mayor at the time but kept the details of her medical plans a secret. She won the election as they awaited word on when she could donate the kidney, saying they grew as close as family during the lull.

“I know he voted for me, too,” she joked.