GOSHEN – A couple from Goshen reached an out-of-court settlement with a roofer they had sued on fraud charges for failing to repair their hail-damaged roof last year.
Travis and Trisha Stewart dropped the case, including a more than $ 250,000 judgment, in July when they partnered with repair company Storm Solution Pros Inc. and its sister company Exact Loss Consulting Inc. to resolve the lawsuit.
Rick Memering, manager of Storm Solution’s South Bend office, said the issue has been resolved since the case was dismissed. He couldn’t tell what the results of the deal were.
The Stewarts first filed the case in March, claiming they waited nine months after Storm Solution hired to repair the roof of their home, which was damaged in a hailstorm in June 2019.
The deal offered after the hailstorm included fine print, according to the lawsuit, in which homeowners signed insurance checks for public adjustment services to Exact Loss and the company withheld a third of the net bill as a fee. The fee would be waived if homeowners hired Storm Solution to do repairs.
But Exact Loss would allegedly withhold the fee if homeowners got impatient and switched contractors while they wait for the work to be completed, according to the information in the lawsuit.
The lawsuit estimated that fewer than 40 roofs were repaired out of more than 600 contracts. Memering said approximately 160 repairs in Goshen have been completed since then.
Since the companies had not filed a lawsuit for about two months, Judge Stephen Bowers of Elkhart County Superior Court 2 ruled in favor of the Stewarts on May 1 by default. He awarded the couple $ 255,723 in damages, tripling the insurance funds they lost plus legal fees.
About two months later, the two sides decided to negotiate the situation out of court.
In an order filed July 20, Judge Bowers said attorneys for the Stewarts and the Company had announced an agreement to overturn the default judgment while they work to resolve the issue. Bowers agreed and dismissed the case with prejudice.
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