WESLEY CHAPEL, Fla. (WFLA) — A judge sentenced the subject of a years-long Better Call Behnken investigation to decades in prison Wednesday.
After the first Better Call Behnken investigation in 2021, more and more people began to come forward.
Customers shared a common experience: Olympus Pools had left them with a hazardous, muddy excavation in their yards and no information on when—or if—their pools would be finished.
For some victims, they look at their pools now years later and think of a money pit, with tens of thousands of dollars now gone.
For one Wesley Chapel women, her backyard oasis just serves as a painful reminder that her parents are now gone.
Carmen Simpson hired Olympus Pools in 2016, saying she needed a pool for a very important reason.
“The pool was intended for my parents to help them stay healthy and mobile,” she explained. “My father suffered from severe clots, requiring him to swim for his well-being.”
“My mother had two replaced knees, and they would freeze up on her; but if she swam, she was able to walk with her own legs,” Simpson continued.
Simpson told 8 On Your Side, she explained that to Olympus Pools Owner James Staten as he toured her property before she signed on.
From there, she said, Olympus Pools employees came out, started the project and poured the concrete.
“It was over a foot too high, and of course, that caused water to back up into our kitchen every time it rains,” Simpson explained.
At that point, Simpson said she had already paid $60,000 up front.
So she wanted them to fix it.
“I insisted that Mr. Staten come out to speak to me,” she said. “He refused. He would never come out here.”
Simpson depicted the incomplete work as “merely an opening, a broad, uncovered opening, where anything or anyone could easily fall in.”
After eight years of painful litigation, Simpson said she was finally able to get a company to come out and finish the work Staten started in 2016.
But by then, she said, it was too late.
“My father wasn’t able to swim, and because of that he passed away in 2018; and just this past week, I lost my mother as well,” she said.
Before the judge handed down the sentence, Staten spoke in court apologizing to the victims.
“I just want everyone involved know that I’m just so deeply sorry for everything that went on,” he said in part.
Now Simpson has her own message for Staten.
“I want him to know the pain that he’s caused me, and his little 80-second announcement in court today, to say he’s sorry, wasn’t even with any remorse,” she said.
News Channel 8 reporter Nicole Rogers asked, “Do you think there could’ve been a different result if Shannon Behnken wouldn’t have gotten involved?”
“I don’t think it would’ve gotten anywhere,” Simpson replied. “I don’t think anyone would’ve listened to us.”
Simpson hopes her story serves as cautionary tale for all Floridians to not pay all of the money up front to contractors and stay involved throughout the entire process.
