For five years, Melissa Sanchez and her husband saved money to renovate their Fort Worth home.
"I just wanted an open floor plan with washer dryer, mudroom," she said Monday.
The couple hired a man they knew as Kris Malachi to do the job. He'd done kitchen work for them before, but in this case their renovation dream became a nightmare.
"He promised the stars and the moon for us," Sanchez said.
After giving him $17,000 and waiting for months, she said he never finished the job.
"We kept believing his lies," she said.
Authorities say Kris Malachi was really a man named Ernest Thibodeaux, a man they say wasn't very earnest at all.
"What he would do was accept that up-front payment and, in some cases, he’d ditch the project and do no further work at all," said Nathan Martin, a prosecutor with the Tarrant County District Attorney's White Collar Crimes Unit.
Once Sanchez went to the Fort Worth Police Department and they in turn put out a "be on the look-out" message to other law enforcement agencies, Martin said authorities uncovered seven similar cases. In once case out of Arlington, Thibodeaux took nearly $5,000 from an elderly woman for new windows, which she never got.
"When we saw the pattern, then we knew this had crossed over from a civil dispute into a criminal matter," Martin said.
Thibodeaux was eventually located by Dallas police asleep in his car. The district attorney's office says he recently pled guilty to two counts of theft in the Sanchez and the elderly woman's cases. In the second case, he pled guilty to theft of an elderly victim, enhancing the punishment range. He'll spend three years and eight months in state jail, and will pay back a total of $77,000 to his eight victims.
In total, Martin believes Thibodeaux had at least a dozen victims in Tarrant County. He added that Thibodeaux will be extradited to Mississippi when he finishes his sentence.
"It was frustrating," Sanchez said of her situation. "It was heartbreaking."
Sanchez had to hire someone else to finish her dream room. Both she and Martin urge people to never pay contractors up front.
"That’s the bottom line," she said. "Don’t just hand over your paycheck because they are asking you to."