Tuesday, March 26, 2024 | 4:28 p.m.
The Nevada State Contractors Board announced today that “one of its most wanted unlicensed contractors,” Alfred Martin Lagunas, was arrested Thursday at his home for felony domestic violence charges.
Last year, Martin Lagunas ran off with $8,000 in cash after working as an unlicensed contractor on resident Barbara Ojito’s house. Ojito said earlier this month that she had met Martin Lagunas at church a decade before, asking him to work on the wall and gate in her front yard that was later completed with no issue.
But last year, when Ojito approached Martin Lagunas about creating a porch in her backyard for her disabled brother to use, Martin Lagunas spent nine months allegedly asking for more money, not paying the men he hired to help him and making a mess of her backyard.
The two ceiling fans installed don’t work, and water leaks onto them when it rains; bare wires pop out of the wall where exposed outlets sit; the lights underneath the porch’s side arches don’t work; a line of outer lamps are differing in color; and concrete squares that line the top of the porch’s wall have all popped off “with just a finger,” Ojito said. Martin Lagunas’ crew also broke a kitchen window, banged a hole into the wall of her house and, while working on shingles for the patio roof, created a leak in her bathroom, Ojito added.
She filmed multiple encounters with the crew and shared it with the Nevada State Contractors Board, which investigated the case and handed it over to the courts. Martin Lagunas was scheduled to appear in the Las Vegas Justice Court at 8:30 a.m. March 11 on a misdemeanor charge of engaging in a contractor business without a license, according to court records filed Jan. 27.
In Nevada, it is illegal to operate as an unlicensed contractor.
Martin Lagunas was placed on the board’s Most Wanted List earlier this month when he failed to appear in court on the unlicensed contractor charges.
“We want to commend the men and women at LVMPD for their help in placing Lagunas behind bars,” Margi Grein, Nevada State Contractors Board executive officer, said in a press release. “We hope this arrest sends a message to others working as unlicensed contractors. You can run but you cannot hide.”
