Short answer. Yes, it can. Indemnification for consequential damages is not confined to what the injured person himself lost. The Revised Penal Code extends it to damage suffered by his family, and even by a third person, by reason of the crime — provided the loss is proved and traceable to the offence.
What the law says
Indemnification for consequential damages shall include not only those caused the injured party, but also those suffered by his family or by a third person by reason of the crime.
Revised Penal Code, Article 107 — What Indemnification Covers. Read the full provision →
The circle of who may be indemnified is wider than the victim
Families assume that only the person struck, defrauded or killed has a claim. The Code says otherwise. Consequential damages reach losses suffered by his family or by a third person, so long as they arose by reason of the crime. A spouse who gave up work to care for an injured husband, children who lost the support a parent was providing, a household that emptied its savings on hospital bills — these are losses of the family, not of the victim alone, and the article does not shut them out merely because the person suffering them was not the one attacked.
"By reason of the crime" is the limit
That phrase is doing the filtering. The loss must be a consequence of the offence, not merely something unfortunate that happened around the same time. Courts look for a real causal link between the criminal act and the damage claimed. Remote, speculative or self-inflicted losses fall outside — a business that failed months later for its own reasons, an opportunity someone believes they might have had. The further the claimed loss sits from the offence, the heavier the burden of showing that the crime, and not something else, produced it.
Proof, not assertion
Consequential damages have to be proved with reasonable certainty, which in practice means documents. Payslips, contracts, receipts, medical statements, and proof of what the deceased or injured person actually earned carry a claim far better than a family's own estimate. Loss of earning capacity in particular is computed, not guessed, from evidence of income and the victim's circumstances. This is why keeping every receipt from the first hospital visit onward matters so much: the claim that succeeds is usually the one that was documented while events were fresh, not reconstructed years later.
How this fits the rest of civil liability
Every person criminally liable is also civilly liable, and that liability has several components — restitution of what was taken, reparation of the damage done, and indemnification for consequential damages, which is what this article defines. Restitution comes first where the thing itself can be returned. Indemnification covers the knock-on losses that restitution cannot repair. The civil action is generally deemed instituted with the criminal case unless it is waived, reserved, or filed separately beforehand, so a family that stays silent about its losses during the criminal proceeding may find the opportunity harder to recover later. Note too that acquittal does not always end civil liability: where the acquittal rests on reasonable doubt rather than a finding that the accused did nothing, the civil claim can survive on the lower standard of proof that civil cases use.