Benitez-Badua v. CA
G.R. No. 105625, January 24, 1994
FACTS:
The spouses Vicente Benitez and Isabel Chipongian owned various properties especially in Laguna. Isabel died on April 25, 1982. Vicente died on November 13, 1989. He died intestate. The fight for administration of Vicente’s estate ensued. On September 24, 1990, private respondents Victoria Benitez-Lirio and Feodor Benitez Aguilar (Vicente’s sister and nephew, respectively) prayed for the issuance of letters of administration of Vicente’s estate in favor of private respondent Aguilar. They alleged, that the decedent was survived by no other heirs or relatives be they ascendants or descendants, whether legitimate, illegitimate or legally adopted; despite claims or representation to the contrary, petitioners can well and truly establish, given the chance to do so, that said decedent and his spouse Isabel Chipongian who predeceased him, and whose estate had earlier been settled extra-judicial, were without issue and/or without descendants whatsoever, and that one Marissa Benitez-Badua who was raised and cared by them since childhood was, in fact, not related to them by blood, nor legally adopted, and was therefore not a legal heir. On November 2, 1990, petitioner opposed the petition. She alleged that she was the sole heir of the deceased Vicente Benitez and capable of administering his estate.
ISSUE:
Whether or not the petitioner is a legally adopted child of the deceased spouses Benitez
RULING:
No. The Court decided that the evidence was utterly insufficient to establish petitioner’s biological and blood kinship with the spouses. The couple being childless and desirous as they were of having a child, the late Vicente O. Benitez took Marissa from somewhere while still a baby, and without he and his wife’s legally adopting her treated, cared for, reared, considered, and loved her as their own true child, giving her the status as not so, such that she herself had believed that she was really their daughter and entitled to inherit from them as such.
The mere registration of a child in his or her birth certificate as the child of the supposed parents is not a valid adoption, does not confer upon the child the status of an adopted child and the legal rights of such child, and even amounts of simulation of the child’s birth or falsification of his or her birth certificate, which is a public document.
If Marissa Benitez was really the daughter of the spouses Vicente O. Benitez and Isabel Chipongian, it would not have been necessary for Isabel to write and plead for the requests to her husband, since Marissa would be their legal heir by operation of law. Obviously, Isabel had to implore and supplicate her husband to give Marissa although without any legal papers her properties when she dies, and likewise for her husband to give Marissa the properties that he would inherit from Isabel since she well knew that Marissa was not truly their daughter and could not be their legal heir unless Isabel’s husband made her so.
