Special Feature

Adopted Son Accuses Fil-Am Socialite For Abandonment

By Alex P. Vidal

It all started from a heated exchange of words in the morning of Oct. 4, 2005. That war of words led both parties to go to the police stations to file complaints against each other.
Joseph Edward “Boy” Diaste, 50, charged his 78-year-old foster mother Leonora Naldoza Gaspalinao-High, a rich and prominent socialite in Iloilo City, of neglecting and abandoning him since he was a child, turned the altercation that started as intra-family feud, from bad to worse. “I had to quit schooling when mommy (Leonora) abandoned me and left for the United States (in 1971) to live with her new husband (Dallas Eugene High, a US Navy officer),” Diaste, who claimed to be a destitute, narrated in an exclusive interview.
Diaste, a former Army soldier and driver in Saudi Arabia, accused his septuagenarian guardian of threatening to have him killed last Oct. 4 after he allegedly confronted the old woman in her residence in Imperial Subdivision, Mandurriao district about her “failed promise” to allow him to live in one of her unoccupied houses worth some P2 million also in Mandurriao.

POLICE REPORT

Diaste reported the alleged threat to the Iloilo City Police Office women and children concern section (WCCS) last Nov. 7, 2005. “Papatay ta na lang ka para wala na may magamo sa akon (I will have you killed so that you will not anymore disturb me), stated the blotter report signed by P01 Janette P. Vargas, WCCS investigator.
Diaste’s foster mother had allegedly promised to allow him to live in the house but changed her mind in the eleventh hour. He was told that somebody was interested to buy the house. Diaste claimed he and his family are living in a P2,000 per-month ramshackle boarding house in La Paz while his foster mother lives in affluence in a two-storey, P6-million subdivision house. He also accused her foster mother of “cavorting with a male companion”. He suspects that the male companion, whom he failed to identify, was “the one who is poisoning the mind of my mother to treat me shabbily and to deny what is due me as the only living son of my mother,” Diaste said in Hiligaynon.
He decried his foster mother’s “night life” because of her age. “She loves ballroom dancing and spends a lot of money for the DI’s (dance instructors) but is hesitant to give me financial assistance,” Diaste stressed. He claimed that Leonora never introduced him to her circle of friends. “Gina kahuya ya ako (she is not proud of me),” he said. “I want the people to know that I am her son and that she should not be ashamed of me and my circumstances in life.” Leonora and Diaste’s father, Eleneo, who died on June 25, 1990 at the age of 63, had no living biological child.

DEATH OF A CHILD

After the death of their first and only baby (he lasted in the incubator for only 18 days), Leonora and her husband Eleneo adopted Diaste from his unwed biological parents—a cop from San Miguel, Iloilo and a married woman whose husband worked in Guam. He didn’t know that his wife had sired a child with the cop.
Leonora and Eleneo baptized Diaste and his certificado de nacimiento (certificate of birth) shows he was born on December 14, 1954. Leonora left for San Diego, California in September 1971 and worked at the American General Insurance. After only a month in the United States, Leonora sent a divorce paper by mail to Eleneo, a former public works employee who became manager of a popular downtown nightclub on J.M. Basa St., Iloilo City. She then married her suitor, British-American Dallas Eugene High in Las Vegas in December 1971. After 24 years of “blissful” marriage, Mr. High succumbed to heart attack on July 29, 1995.

HOMECOMING

When Leonora, now Mrs. High, returned to the Philippines in 1978, she looked for Diaste’s whereabouts and when she found him “living in a slum area”, she bought a house and lot for him and his family in Cabanatuan city worth P600,000.
“If I abandoned him, how come I bought a house and lot for him?” Mrs. High, now an American citizen, quipped. “And besides, he is already 50 or even more than that. He is old enough to be abandoned.”
Mrs. High belied Diaste’s claim that she never gave him money. “That’s a big lie,” she boomed. “Only last month, I gave him a total P102,000 for his business (ukay-ukay). Everytime he went to me, he always asked for money. He always wanted my money, all money and no love whatsoever.” Mrs. High resented Diaste’s insistence that he be given his share of her estate “because I’m still alive.”
“I can give him money anytime if I want to but he cannot force me to give him money all the time. I am still alive and I want to enjoy my life because I am alone,” she lamented. “In my age, I need somebody to love me, to care for me, to understand me. He should be the one who will take care of me, but look what he is doing to me?”
The misty-eyed Mrs. High said she considers Diaste as “my cross. He is a pain in my life and I am sad about this.”

THREATENING WORDS

She admitted having uttered those threatening words attributed her by Diaste in the police blotter “but I only said those words out of my emotional pain; I do not mean it and I don’t intend to have him killed because, in the first place, how can I do that when I am a Catholic?”
The incident in the morning of October 4 gave her a realization, she said, that Diaste does not love her but only her money. “He started to kick all the stuffs in my house and was very angry (when I told him that he could not live in that house because somebody was interested to buy it),” she narrated.
She also recorded the incident at the Mandurriao Police Station through P01 Rubin C. Berondo, duty investigator, where Diaste was listed as “56 years old”. It was not true that she did attend to Diaste’s welfare, she said, because when she was still in the US, she regularly sent him money everytime he would call her by long distance. She also spent for Diaste’s apartment and education in the University of San Agustin but Diaste did not take his studies seriously as he was enamored with his barkadas.
Mrs. High also claimed that she spent a lot of money when she sent Diaste to Saudi Arabia three times “but each time he would come home, he always had no money.”

HALL OF JUSTICE COMPLAINT

Diaste filed a complaint against Mrs. High in the Provincial Attorney’s Office (PAO) and according to lawyer Ricardo Octavio both parties have been invited for a “meeting” in the Hall of Justice on November 18 for a possible “amicable settlement.”
Mrs. High said she will not come and will instead request her lawyer Florecita Gelvezon to represent her, if necessary. “What for? I don’t want to see him anymore because I don’t want trouble,” she said.
Mrs. High, adjudged as Mrs. Women’s League titlist in 1964 during the celebration of Freedom Day in honor of then Senator Rodolfo T. Ganzon, said she does not want to get sick as a result of her feud with Diaste whom she had treated as a real son since a child.
She denied carrying an illicit affair with a “male companion” but admitted she has many suitors because of her beauty. “I don’t entertain them anymore because I fear that they are only after my money,” she said.
The male companion Diaste was referring to is a married man, she said, and he is the builder of her new two-story mansion. “I don’t want to name names as I don’t want to drag innocent people,” she chortled.
Mrs. High admitted she had a boyfriend, Arturo Ocampo, a retired US Navy officer, but they never get married. Ocampo, a Filipino-American whom she met in the US, is now in Manila and never returned “after Boy (Diaste) said something that must have hurt him (Deocampo). He would have been my third husband.”
She defended her night life, saying she “needs the ballroom dancing as a regular exercise because of my age. What’s wrong with that?” Mrs. High said Diaste can get his inheritance only when she is already gone.
Will she reconcile and forgive her adopted son? “Bahala na ang Dyios sa iya. I will leave him to God.”

Use Charm To Win
Your Mom’s Heart’

Instead of dousing gasoline to the conflagration and egging him to file a civil case against his moneyed foster mother, lawyer Ricardo Octavio advised Joseph Edward “Boy” Diaste to “use your charm and woo back your mother” in an effort to patch up the antagonism and hostility that is bedeviling them as mother and son.
“Do you use soft words when dealing with your mommy? Do you talk to her nicely? If not, use your charm and understand her situation because she is already old,” Octavio told Diaste, during a meeting in the lawyer’s office.
Diaste sought Octavio’s legal advice after he filed a complaint at the Iloilo City Police Office women and children concern section (WCCS) last Nov. 7 alleging that her foster parent Leonora Naldoza Gaspalinao-High, a septuagenarian, had threatened to have him murdered for being a pesky son last Oct. 4.
Diaste also narrated to Octavio the circumstances why he wanted a piece of her mother’s estate even if the 78-year-old Filipino-American socialite is still alive and in excellent physical shape.
“I might wake up one day with nothing to get from her,” Diaste feared. “It seems she trusts her male companion more than me as her only son.”

LEGAL ADVICE

Octavio said he specializes in labor cases and seldom handles civil and criminal cases. He did not charge any centavo for Diaste for the “legal advice” but encouraged him to seek “a more peaceful solution” to his problem with Mrs. High.
The lawyer, an associate of the late former Iloilo City mayor Rodolfo T. Ganzon, cautioned Diaste from further antagonizing her “mommy” because “at 78, she is experienced and full of wisdom and she already knows a lot.”
When Diaste showed Octavio the black and white photo of his mother taken in the early 60’s, Octavio easily recognized her as “a socialite with lots of connections from the who’s who in Iloilo and Negros.”
Octavio wants Diaste, a father of four, to wager a “win-win” solution “because your mother is only human.”
“Court her; use soft words. Who knows, she might change her mind (and give you what you are asking from her),” said Octavio, who once ran and lost for city councilor under Ganzon in 1992. /MP