“Is somebody going to pay me?” the contractor asked a neighbor who was there. The homeowner says she was at work when the contractor began wrecking the renovation he had just completed.
A Colorado contractor with a sledgehammer flipped the bird at a home surveillance camera before demolishing the bathroom he just renovated over a payment dispute.
“We put weeks into this. Thousands of dollars into this,” the contractor said in a video of the incident.
The contractor claimed he was owed money, so he was going to destroy what he just built. The owner wasn’t home, but a neighbor pleaded with him to stop.
“Is somebody going to pay me?” the contractor said.
“Sir, I'm just asking you to stop. It's not your house to destroy,” the neighbor said.
“This is my property. This is my property. I have receipts for everything,” the contractor replied.
The contractor’s wife was there with him as he dared someone to call the police.
Homeowner Amber Trucke told Inside Edition she was horrified when she came home and saw her newly-renovated bathroom destroyed.
“It’s really hard as a single woman to watch a video of an angry man in your house violently, in a rage, destroying your property and screaming,” Trucke said.
She says she had already paid the contractor in Colorado Springs more than $3,000 of the $7,500 bill.
“One of the biggest mistakes I made was there was no contract. There was no agreement. They gave me an estimate, and then at the end, they demanded payment two hours after they finished, while I was at work,” Trucke said.
“I said, ‘Listen, I need to get home. I need to check it.’” the homeowner continued.
The company says, “Communication broke down and resulted in our company repossessing a tile shower. It has never happened before and is not something that is made regular practice."
“Let me tell you something, no contractor in the state of Colorado will fix that when they found out I took it back, because you refused to pay me,” the contractor said.
Since the video was made public, three contractors have offered to fix the bathroom for free.
