Case Study: Aguayo v. Amaro (2013)

The House on Gillig Avenue

Herman and Isabel Infante took title to 3665 Gillig Avenue in Los Angeles by grant deed in 1946. It was the family home. They raised two sons there, Alfred and Richard. Richard's daughter Michelle grew up in the house until she was nine, when she was adopted by another family because, as she later testified, her father could not care for her.

Herman died in 1969. Isabel died intestate in 1993. Alfred and Richard kept living in the house. Nobody opened a probate.

That last sentence is the entire vulnerability. An intestate estate with no administrator is a property that legally belongs to a set of heirs who have not been identified, holding title nobody is actively managing, generating tax bills that arrive at a house where the person named on them has died. It is the single most exposed condition in California residential real estate, and it can persist for years without anyone noticing.

In 1995, a letter arrived at the house. It was addressed to Isabel Infante and asked whether the property might be for sale. Isabel had been dead for two years.

Adverse Possession as a Line of Business

The letter came from Sofia Aguayo. Her husband, Jesus Duran Aguayo, testified that he was in the business of acquiring properties through adverse possession. He said he had filed roughly ten quiet title actions. The opinion records that he had developed an expertise in the practice, and that Sofia worked with him in the same occupation.

That admission matters more than anything else in the record, because it establishes what the Aguayos knew. Everything that follows was done by people who understood the five elements precisely.

What followed reads like a checklist. Sofia contended Alfred agreed orally to sell his contingent interest for $25,000, and that Jesus gave him $2,000 in cash in 1995 in exchange for a promise to open probate. Alfred never opened it. He died intestate in 2001. On January 2, 1999, Jesus posted a sign on the property reading No Trespassing and naming Sofia as the owner. They changed the locks on the front door, put a fence around the property, and did electrical, plumbing, and drywall work. In April 1999, Jesus said he lent Richard $2,000 in cash. On January 1, 2000, Jesus drafted a document titled Part Sale & Rental Agreement under which Richard would rent the property from Jesus for $400 a month, and would transfer his rights in exchange for the $2,000 and 54 months of rent credit, totaling $23,600.

From 1999 through 2004, Richard lived in the house, apart from several stays in county jail. The No Trespassing sign stayed up. Jesus visited weekly.

Actual occupation. Hostile to the owner's title. A claim of the property as their own. Continuous for more than five years. That is four of the five elements, assembled deliberately over a period of years.

The fifth element required paying the taxes. And that is where the case turns from an aggressive property claim into something a court of equity would not tolerate.

The Wild Deed

On April 27, 2000, the Aguayos recorded a quitclaim deed. It purported to transfer the property from a person named Jesus Duran to Jesus Aguayo and Sofia Aguayo. Jesus conceded at trial that his legal name was not Jesus Duran.

The document was a wild deed, meaning it was recorded outside the chain of title. It came from a grantor who had never held title, so it conveyed nothing. On its own terms it was legally inert.

It did one thing. The deed instructed that tax statements be mailed to Sofia Aguayo at a post office box in Downey. After it was recorded, the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder sent every tax bill for the property to that box. The Infante family had no access to it. Sofia then paid all the bills that came due from 2000 through 2006, and the back taxes owed from 1993 through 1999 as well.

What the wild deed actually did

• Statutory notice path
• Severed by the recording
• Diverted path

Why the Tax Element Exists

Most people read Code of Civil Procedure section 325 as a fee: pay five years of taxes and the land can become yours. That reading misses what the requirement is for.

The annual tax bill is a notification device. It arrives every year and tells the owner of record that they own something and that something is owed on it. If an owner ignores that reminder for five consecutive years while a stranger occupies the land and pays the bill, the law treats the combination as meaningful evidence of abandonment. The payment is not the point. The owner's opportunity to notice, and their failure to act on it, is the point.

Sofia understood this well enough to attack it directly. She did not need a deed to satisfy any element of adverse possession, and the trial court found she knew that. What the deed did was guarantee that the one built-in warning the statute gives a distracted owner would never reach the house.

She did not satisfy the tax element. She disabled it, and then satisfied what was left. The mechanism at the center of Aguayo

Claim of Right and Color of Title Are Not the Same Thing

California recognizes two routes to adverse possession, and confusing them is one of the most common mistakes in this area. They are codified in different statutes and carry different requirements. The distinction did real work in Aguayo, and it will do real work in any claim you are evaluating.

Why Trespass Alone Is Never Unclean Hands

Sofia's central argument on appeal had real force. Adverse possession by claim of right necessarily involves wrongful occupation of someone else's land. If a court can call that wrongful occupation unclean hands, then the doctrine cannot exist at all, because every claimant would be barred by definition.

The Court of Appeal agreed with the premise. California law settled it back in 1962: a claimant under mere claim of right is an intruder without any bona fide belief in title, and holding that such a person is barred by unclean hands would eliminate adverse possession for everyone except those claiming under color of title. The court there traced the doctrine to its origins, describing the claimant who takes by bow and spear and defends against all comers until the statutory period runs.

So the trespass could not support the defense. Something else had to. The court found it in a principle already well established: misconduct is only unclean hands if it relates directly to the claim for which relief is sought. And the conduct need not be criminal or even tortious. Anything that violates conscience, good faith, or equitable standards of conduct will do.

Which means the line the court drew is narrow and specific. Occupying land you know is not yours does not disqualify you. Manipulating the owner's ability to discover and stop you does. Sofia's wild deed did not help her possess the property. It stopped the estate from learning that anyone was paying its taxes.

Two older cases the court distinguished make the boundary clearer. In one, the claim of unclean hands failed because there was no evidence the plaintiffs had acted inequitably toward the defendants at all. In another, a property owner's earlier fraudulent transactions could not be used against a later adverse possession claimant, because the fraud did not relate directly to that claimant's possession. Both illustrate the same requirement from the other side: the misconduct has to be aimed at the very claim in front of the court.

What It Cost, and What Came After

In August 2004, Sofia filed her verified quiet title complaint. Michelle Amaro, the granddaughter who had grown up in the house, took an assignment of Richard's interest that November and was appointed special administrator of Isabel's estate the following day, eleven years after Isabel died.

The trial in August 2006 was a bench trial on competing quiet title claims. Two witnesses testified: Jesus and Amaro. In November the court issued its statement of decision, finding the technical requirements met and the claim barred by unclean hands.

Six days before that decision issued, a grand jury indicted Jesus and Sofia on 22 counts arising from their adverse possession business, involving multiple alleged victims. In 2008 a jury convicted them of vandalizing this property, entering it without authorization, and conspiracy. Those convictions were affirmed. They were acquitted on certain forgery counts, and the count concerning the quitclaim deed was dismissed before trial. Sofia argued on appeal that the acquittal undercut the trial court's finding.

The Court of Appeal set that aside in a sentence that is worth remembering. An acquittal carries no res judicata effect in a civil case because the standards of proof differ, and it did not matter here in any event: unclean hands does not require a crime. Whether Sofia violated a penal statute was simply not part of the analysis.

Judgment was finally entered in December 2010. The record does not explain the four-year gap. The property belonged to the Estate of Isabel Infante. The appeal was decided in January 2013, sixty-seven years after Herman and Isabel bought the house.

Does This Describe Property You Own or Expect to Inherit?

Aguayo is not a story about a rare kind of criminal. It is a story about a house that was left unattended in an unopened estate for eleven years, which is an ordinary situation. If any of the following is true, the conditions that made this case possible are present right now.

How an Owner Defeats a Claim Like This

The Infante estate won, but it won late and expensively, after a bench trial and an appeal spanning nearly a decade. Every one of the steps below would have ended the claim earlier, and most cost very little.

Read With Nellie Gail: Two Ways to Lose the Same Claim

These two published decisions are the clearest pair in California adverse possession law, and they fail in opposite directions.

In Nellie Gail Ranch Owners Assn. v. McMullin (2016), homeowners enclosed more than 6,100 square feet of association common area and lost because they could not satisfy the tax element. Association common area is assessed to every member's individual lot, so no single member can produce a certified record showing they paid its taxes. The claim was structurally impossible.

In Aguayo, the claimant satisfied the tax element completely and lost anyway, because of how she satisfied it. Which means the two cases together mark the outer edges of the doctrine: the tax requirement is nearly impossible to meet honestly, and meeting it dishonestly forfeits the equitable remedy you need to convert possession into title. That is the practical reason successful California adverse possession claims are so rare, and why the ones that succeed usually involve unusual tax circumstances rather than unusually long occupation.

For a claimant, the useful takeaway is that the alternatives are often stronger than the claim itself. Prescriptive easements carry no tax requirement. Boundary line agreements, lot line adjustments, and negotiated purchases produce recordable title without litigation. Those routes are laid out in the Nellie Gail case study, and they apply here with equal force.

How These Cases Present Across Los Angeles County

Aguayo was a Los Angeles property, decided by the Second District, which is the appellate court covering Los Angeles County. The pattern it describes recurs across the region wherever older housing stock meets long family ownership and delayed estate administration.

DiJulio Law Group advises property owners, heirs, buyers, and businesses on these matters as part of its California real estate law practice, including adverse possession and quiet title, boundary and encroachment disputes, easements and access, and transactional real estate. The real estate practice center explains what to gather before a first consultation, and the real estate resource library covers common property-rights questions. Additional decisions are collected in our California case study library.

How DiJulio Law Group Approaches Quiet Title and Possession Disputes

These matters usually arrive through a document. A family tries to sell an inherited house and title comes back clouded by an instrument nobody recognizes. An owner living out of state realizes the tax bills stopped years ago. A relative who has occupied a property for a decade asks whether it is now theirs. The doctrine is settled. What varies is what the records show, and how much time is left.

The first work is diagnostic and largely factual: pulling a current title report and every recorded instrument in the chain, obtaining the county tax payment and mailing history, locating the probate file or confirming none was ever opened, establishing when occupation began and whether anything interrupted it, and identifying which limitations periods are running. That analysis typically settles the strength of a claim or a defense before a complaint is drafted.

DiJulio Law Group has represented property owners, heirs, buyers, sellers, and businesses in Glendale, Los Angeles, and throughout Southern California for more than 35 years in real estate, business, construction, environmental, and mediation matters. Founding partner R. David DiJulio brings a background in environmental science alongside his legal practice. Senior litigator Valeria Granata handles trial and appellate work in California real estate and business matters.