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Eyewitness Wants To Know: Dream pool turns into big mess, big hole

Jeremiah Perkins has been convicted of multiple felony theft charges and people say he's also taking money for construction jobs and not delivering on his promises.

SAN ANTONIO -- Trish and Steve Rawls hired Jeremiah Perkins from Down Right Concrete to renovate and re-plaster their pool.

They say they gave him $16,000 last April for the project, but now their pool is a mess and left them with a giant hole in their backyard.

Steve Rawls says Perkins used the wrong concrete and ruined the tiles. They say Perkins wouldn’t show up when he said he would.

Finally, they had enough. They demanded their money back and they say that’s when Perkins stopped responding to them.

“The next person he goes and takes $16,000 might keep them from putting food on the table. So my main goal is to keep him from doing this,” Trish Rawls said.

Jot Ditges says he also hired Jeremiah Perkins to help him build a storage facility in Fredericksburg. He says he paid almost $400,000 for materials and labor. Ditges says that Perkins didn’t install the insulation correctly and, because of the bad construction, many of the materials were ruined from rain water.

“I had to invest another $75,000 to hire two crews to come in and disassemble the building, and we had to replace approximately 200 panels that had holes in them,” Ditges said.

Ditges is suing Perkins for $250,000 in damages.

Eyewitness Wants To Know tracked down Jeremiah Perkins for answers. He says he thinks he did a great job with Joe Ditges’ facility but admits that the complaints from the Rawls family about their pool are fair.

“I took on more jobs than I could handle at once,” he said. “I hired some extra guys that I wasn’t familiar with so the coping, the pool coping that you say there that was covering the tile, that was not a good finish.”

He says he offered to come and fix it, but the Rawls didn’t want him to come back.

The Gillespie County District Attorney’s Office has indicted Perkins and is prosecuting him on a felony theft charge for an unrelated case. Perkins was convicted of the same charge back in 2008. He says that conviction is not related to his construction work.

If you have a problem you’d like Eyewitness Wants To Know to look into you can call us at 210-377-8647 or email us at ewtk@kens5.com.

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