Grandmother’s Trust Left the House to Her Son, Who Died First — an Appeals Court Revived His Children’s Claim Against Their Aunt the Trustee

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It started the way a lot of family estate fights do: one parent wrote down a plan, time passed, and death arrived out of order. When Ya-Ching Tung died, her revocable living trust said her son would get “any and all real property,” including a Santa Monica home. But her son had died years earlier, and the person running the trust—Tung’s daughter—asked the court to treat that gift as gone.

That decision didn’t stick. In a published opinion, a California appeals court revived the late son’s children’s claim and sent the case back, finding the trust didn’t clearly say the grandchildren should be cut out just because their father died first. The ruling, In re Tung Trust, turns on a familiar estate-planning landmine: “survivorship” language that looks decisive until you read what it actually does—and doesn’t—say.

A trust meant to split things cleanly

Tung created the Tung Trust in October 2011. She named herself trustee and her oldest child, Lin-Chuan Yeh, as successor trustee. She also identified three successor beneficiaries: Lin-Chuan and her two daughters, Lin-Chia Yeh and Lillian Gaecke.

The trust estate included her residence on 26th Street in Santa Monica, plus bank accounts and safe deposit box contents. The distribution plan in the trust was specific: upon Tung’s death, “any and all real property” would go to Lin-Chuan. Bank accounts without a designated beneficiary would be split one-half to Lin-Chuan, one-third to Lin-Chia, and one-sixth to Gaecke.

Notably, the trust didn’t spell out a backup distribution if a named child died first. It also didn’t include a residuary clause—language that catches whatever’s left if a gift fails. And while Lin-Chuan had three adult children (Nicholas, Savannah, and Joyce), the document didn’t mention them by name.

Then death happened out of sequence

Lin-Chuan died on July 26, 2016. Tung died almost three years later, on May 7, 2019. After Tung’s death, Lin-Chia died on January 3, 2020, without issue.

That left one living child, Gaecke, who moved to step into control. In February 2020, she filed an ex parte application in probate court to be appointed successor trustee. The court appointed her temporary successor trustee and authorized her to handle urgent tax issues.

By May 2020, Gaecke filed a combined petition asking the probate court to determine trust property and to identify beneficiaries and decide distribution. She alleged there were cash assets exceeding $1 million across 27 different bank accounts that belonged in the trust estate, and she asked for a ruling that Lin-Chuan’s share “failed” because he died before Tung.

If Lin-Chuan’s gifts lapsed, Gaecke argued, they should revert and be distributed under intestacy rules. That path mattered: intestacy could potentially re-route what the trust tried to do, especially without a residuary clause to mop up failed transfers.

The grandchildren said the law was supposed to protect them

The Yeh children objected. Their argument was straightforward: California’s antilapse statute exists to stop exactly this kind of accidental disinheritance when a close relative beneficiary dies first. Under Probate Code section 21110, if a transferee who is kindred of the transferor dies before the transfer, that transferee’s issue can “stand in the shoes” of the deceased and take the gift—unless the instrument clearly shows the transferor intended otherwise.

Gaecke’s counter was also straightforward: the trust contained a “Survivor by 30 Days” clause. It said that, unless otherwise specifically provided, if any person named in the instrument failed to survive Tung by 30 days, that person would be “considered to have predeceased the settlor” for all purposes of the trust.

To Gaecke, that was enough. If Lin-Chuan was treated as having predeceased Tung, then, in her view, his gifts were out, and the antilapse statute shouldn’t rescue them because the trust had expressed a “contrary intention.”

A trial judge read the 30-day clause as a deal-breaker

In 2024, Gaecke sought summary adjudication—basically asking the court to decide the key legal issue without a full trial. The probate court agreed with her and treated the 30-day survivorship language as unambiguous and overriding, emphasizing the phrase “for all purposes of this trust.”

The judge said it was hard to see what else the survivorship provision would mean if it didn’t operate as a survival requirement that made the antilapse statute inapplicable. The probate court granted the motion and held that the trust “expresses a different intention to the application of the anti-lapse statute,” meaning Lin-Chuan’s gifts lapsed.

The Yeh children appealed, and the appellate court also had to deal with a procedural fight: was this order appealable if other trust-administration issues remained? The court said yes, because it finally resolved a discrete probate proceeding about determining beneficiaries and who gets trust property.

The appeals court said “treated as predeceased” isn’t the same as “cut off”

The Second District Court of Appeal, Division Seven, reversed. The key point was not that survivorship language can never block antilapse—it can. The opinion even cited a prior case where a trust required beneficiaries to survive 60 days “before entitlement,” which was enough to show a contrary intention.

But this trust didn’t go that far. The court focused on what the “Survivor by 30 Days” clause actually said: it created a rule for how to treat someone who didn’t survive Tung by 30 days. What it didn’t say was that the gift would not pass on to that person’s children, or that survival was a condition of taking in a way that displaced the statutory presumption.

In the court’s view, the absence of clear, explicit language mattered. California law favors interpretations that prevent intestacy or the failure of a transfer, and the antilapse statute is designed to prevent descendants from being unintentionally written out. Without clear language showing Tung meant to disinherit Lin-Chuan’s issue, the statute applied.

The appeals court also pointed to other trust language that suggested Tung knew how to speak plainly when she wanted a specific outcome. One provision about “Additions to the Trust” referenced distributing to a beneficiary or, if not living, to the beneficiary’s “then-living issue,” showing the document contemplated gifts passing down a generation in at least some context. And the no-contest clause included explicit language about a challenger being treated as predeceased “without surviving issue,” a reminder that the trust drafter could have written a similar exclusion here—but didn’t.

The result: the order granting summary adjudication was reversed, and the trial court was directed to enter a new order denying it. That doesn’t automatically hand the house to the grandchildren, but it puts their claim back in play under the antilapse statute.

Where families tend to focus when this kind of clause blows up

Even without public comments attached to the opinion, the pressure points are familiar in these disputes. One side tends to argue, “The document says what it says—survival matters.” The other side argues, “If grandma wanted to cut out grandkids, she would have said so plainly.” Here, the appeals court sided with the second framing, at least at the summary stage.

The real-world takeaway is how quickly “miscellaneous” boilerplate can become the whole case. A 30-day survivorship clause is often intended to prevent administrative chaos when deaths happen close together. But when the trust doesn’t also explain what happens to that person’s share, it can trigger a fight over whether the law fills the gap with a substitute gift to descendants.

Now the Tung Trust dispute goes back to probate court, with the grandchildren no longer written off by a single survivorship paragraph. The estate still has to be sorted, the trust property identified, and the distribution decided—but the family’s battle lines have been redrawn around one big point: if the trust didn’t clearly disinherit the next generation, California law may refuse to do it for her.