LUBBOCK, Texas – It was March 2022 when EverythingLubbock.com first reported accusations of fraud involving Lubbock-based pool company Aqua Kingz and its owner Roderick Jeffrey.
A number of customers claimed they gave Jeffrey thousands of dollars for a down payment on a pool, but never got the finished project. When we talked with Jeffrey at the time, the 37-year-old said he was “taking active measures to get them paid back.” Fast forward a year, and that never happened.
Jeffrey is now facing multiple theft charges. He has an arraignment on Friday in Denton County where he’s facing charges of property theft between $30,000 and $150,000.
“He actually physically showed up here in our house in December 2021,” said Nicole Conner, an Aqua Kingz customer out of Little Elm. “We gave him $1,500 cash as payment to get started, then we signed the contract over DocuSign. I never saw him again.”
Vicki Whiteaker out of Abilene said she had a similar situation to Conner. She said no pool was ever built, but she paid Jeffrey a lot more. She said even when she asked Jeffrey to return her money, he found a loophole.
“He writes my husband a check with the Aqua Kingz letterhead everything that was like $49,000,” Vicki Whiteaker, an Aqua Kingz customer out of Abilene. “It bounced from here to high heaven.”
As EverythingLubbock.com reported previously, Whiteaker was not alone. It was through their unfortunate experiences that numerous of Jeffrey’s alleged victims would come together.
“We all have that common ground,” Conner said. “We’ve all gone through the same thing. We’ve all been burned by this person.”
Whiteaker said all of the alleged victims plan to do everything in their power to ensure other families don’t get cheated out of their backyard dream.
“As far as getting your money back, that’s not going to happen,” Whiteaker said. “Personally, I can go to sleep at night knowing that he’s behind bars and can’t do this to anybody else.”
In addition to his arraignment for property theft between $30,000 and $150,000 in Denton on Friday, Jeffrey also has two more active cases. One of those is also out of Denton County for failure to appear in court on property theft charges between $2,500 and $30,000. The other is out of Howard County for theft of service between $30,000 and $150,000.
