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Man wanted for selling home repair jobs, not doing the work in multiple states, including Indiana

Police are looking for a man that a family says charged their mom thousands of dollars for an incomplete driveway seal job.

INDIANAPOLIS — Brett Sullivan is keeping busy updating his mom's home.

Updates include posting no solicitation signs and installing cameras around her property.

"It should see everything out in front of it," Sullivan explained about his video doorbell. “I've got other cameras. They're going on the deck."

Sullivan is making the home improvements after a home improvement job went wrong.

"She's embarrassed about it," he said, "but she also doesn't want this to happen to somebody else."

In November 2023, Sullivan’s mom answered a knock on her front door from a man who said he could seal her cracked driveway for a few hundred dollars.

Mom told Sullivan the man pitched the job while wearing a construction vest during a time when construction workers were paving her road.

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"She thought he was just part of the construction for the road," Sullivan told 13News.

The man got to work, Sullivan thinks, for maybe an hour.

"There are thousands of cracks here, but there's nothing sealed," Sullivan pointed out. "It's just like black spray paint."

Credit: Brett Sullivan
Unsealed cracks after David S. Broadway allegedly failed to do any work for which he was contracted.

Then, the man was back at mom's door with a new invoice costing $2,000.

"She said, ‘I can't afford that. You said it was going to be a few hundred dollars.’"

Intimidated, Sullivan said, mom wrote the check and made it out to David S. Broadway, which was the name on the invoice. 

When the family did some digging, it found investigations of a man with the same name from another station owned by WTHR’s parent company TEGNA, WTOL, in Toledo, Ohio. 

Mom said the man in those stories is the same person who came to her door.

The Hendricks County Sheriff's Office in Indiana also agrees it is the same man and issued a warrant for Broadway’s arrest. 

The issues documented here in central Indiana sound a lot like the issues also reported in Toledo.

Credit: Hendricks County Sheriff's Office
David S. Broadway

WTOL's investigations tracked complaints against Broadway and his convictions going back decades.

More recently, during the summer of 2023, they reported that Broadway charged a man $4,200 for a job he initially quoted for $300

In Pennsylvania between 2012 and 2013, Broadway pleaded guilty to eight theft-related charges and was sentenced to some jail time. 

He currently faces additional charges in Pennsylvania, but the state says he's absconded parole. 

Before that, in Ohio, Broadway served roughly 10 years total in prison for crimes including theft and burglary.

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He is wanted there too, according to the Hendricks County Sheriff's Office. 

The investigative reporter at WTOL said police told her that Broadway has made his way to the Orlando area and is already accused of doing the same thing in that area.

As for Sullivan, his family has added mom to Indianapolis' no-knock registry to prevent unwanted visitors. Residents need to sign up for this list annually

A spokesperson for the Department of Business and Neighborhood Services said residents can report violations, including evidence of the interaction, by calling the Mayor's Action Center at 317-327-4622 or reaching out to the Department of Business and Neighborhood Services directly at licensing@indy.gov.

The department added that it generally receives only one to two solicitation complaints each year. 

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