Niece was planning 70th birthday celebration for missing woman,
Maricoy Obias-Bonnefoy and her husband Claudio Bonnefoy were world travelers who normally spent little time at Champlain Towers South during their 15 years in the building. COVID-19 forced them to stay an entire year in their beachfront apartment, but they were slowly getting back into their routine of planning long journeys and organizing family gatherings. Both were looking forward to a family reunion in Miami last Sunday. It never happened.
Their family is now mourning their loss in the partial collapse of the towers on June 24. But they are also celebrating Obias-Bonnefoy’s life as the heart of the large family from the Philippines.
She was the family’s chief organizer, planning everything from weddings to graduation parties and baby showers. Most importantly, she planned reunions of her huge family from San Jose, in the Philippines, often bringing dozens of people together. She also hosted Irene and her two sisters for seven years when they came to live in the U.S. in the 1980s, becoming a second mother to the teenage girls.
“She planned my wedding; she gave me my wedding dress,” said Irene Obias-Sanchez, ObiasBonnefoy’s niece, her voice cracking with emotion. “She is the most energetic, the most generous person I know; my Tita Coy is my Oprah and I will always look up to her,” she said, affectionately calling her aunt by the Filipino term “tita” for “auntie.”
Obias-Bonnefoy, 69, was born in the Philippines and moved in the 1970s to the Washington, D.C., area. That’s where she met her husband, Claudio Bonnefoy, 85, a native of Chile. They lived on the 10th floor in unit 1001 of the Champlain Towers South condominium.
On Friday, Miami-Dade police said the couple had been killed in the condo collapse on June 24.
They bought the oceanfront apartment 15 years ago after moving from Washington, where she had worked in finance at the International Monetary Fund since the 1980s and where Bonnefoy, a lawyer and second uncle of former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, had worked at the Chilean embassy and later at satellite services provider Intelsat.
They recently celebrated their 30-year anniversary.
Obias-Sanchez said her aunt dedicated just as much energy to people she didn’t know through several philanthropic endeavors in her native Philippines and in the U.S.
When deadly typhoons and tropical storms hit the islands last year, destroying a school near her hometown of San Jose, Obias-Bonnefoy not only raised funds but also planned a reconstruction effort. She supported medical missions to the area for years and also helped build a library, her niece said.
Just weeks from turning 70, Obias-Bonnefoy, who was also known as Maria to her friends, was making plans to keep traveling the world with her husband.
Her love of adventure was palpable on her Facebook profile: Torres del Paine in Chile, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, Piazza San Marco in Venice, Machu Picchu in Peru, Luang Prabang in Laos and the Inari shrine in Japan are just some of her travel photos, always beautifully framed.
She was also an artist who liked to gift paintings she made to her friends. One of them shows three lotus flowers on a lake, which she painted for her yoga teacher, Bonnie Quiceno, a few years ago.
“That painting is on my piano,” said Quiceno, who had known Obias-Bonnefoy since she moved from D.C. to Surfside and started practicing yoga at Florida International University’s fitness center about 15 years ago. They became close friends who often cooked dinner together at Quiceno’s house. “I can’t be anywhere in my house where I don’t see Maria. Her paintings, the jugs she would bring juices in, the passion fruit vine in my backyard that she loved,” she said.
Quiceno said her friend was frequently out of town, but made an effort to keep her group of friends updated on her travels. She would not only post photos and updates on Facebook, but she would sometimes call on video conferences to “bring her friends along on her journeys.”
“Maria had this talent for connecting with people and then fiercely cultivating her friendships. She wanted us to be around when she traveled, so she would sometimes call while she was visiting a special place.” said Quiceno.
Obias-Bonnefoy had clearly embraced her husband Claudio’s Chilean family and heritage, traveling several times to Chile in the past few years and posting commentary about a French documentary on the history of the Bachelet family, “from their origin sin ChassagneMontrachet, a small village in southeast France, to Santiago, Chile, where Louis-Joseph Bachelet emigrated after he lost his vineyard to bankruptcy,” she wrote.
Bonnefoy was writing his family’s history, according to his daughters Pascale and Anne-Marie, who arrived in Miami over the weekend from Santiago, according to El Pais.
Many of Obias-Bonnefoy’s family flew to Miami after news of the collapse, including two sisters who live in Washington and a brother from the Philippines.