Is a Damaged Will an Invalid Will? Part 2

In my post here last week, I told you about a call we received from Son concerning Dad’s will.  The original will had been in Son’s possession but after Dad’s passing he discovered that it had been damaged.  Someone spilled liquid on it which had caused parts to be unreadable.  When he separated the pages some of them disintegrated in his hands which rendered them unreadable.

Son had been given different instructions from 2 different employees at the Surrogate’s office about how to proceed.  Rather than focus on trying to determine exactly what he said to each employee I instead asked him about the circumstances of his dad’s signing and then what happened after that until Dad died.

He told me that after Dad received the signed will, he asked Son to hold onto it.  Son put it in a file cabinet and did not take it out until several years later after Dad died.  Son told me that until his death, Dad did not ever tell him that he was signing another will.  Likewise Dad did not ever tell him to destroy the one on had in his possession.  Son told me that Dad always confided in him so he would have known if Dad had signed a new will.

I told Son that even if a court considered the will in Son’s possession to be his Last Will, we still had the problem of parts of it being destroyed and thus, not readable.  Son did, however, also have copies of the will so I was confident that between the original and the copies we could put together and the entire document.

I told Son that proceeding with estate administration as if there was no longer a valid will was not the proper course of action.  We couldn’t simply ignore the existence of a partially readable original will because the estate would be distributed differently under intestacy laws than how Dad had detailed in his will.

So what exactly did we do?  I’ll share that next week.