‘Weeks of absolute hell’: Treasure Valley residents rankled by contractor accused of fraud

Rebecca Turlay grew up in Meridian and found yoga after being injured while serving in the U.S. Navy. In March 2021, as the pandemic took a heavy toll on small businesses, she spent a chunk of her savings to share her passion and open a yoga studio in Kuna. Past studios had come and gone in the area, but Turlay was determined to make hers a success.

Turlay, a part-time college student, hit a snag when she noticed her studio’s floors were bubbling from the hot yoga classes she teaches, where temperatures can reach 108 degrees. She settled on upgrading her floors and eventually landed on a local contractor she found through Facebook. He told Turlay an epoxy coating would be the ideal solution — and he could do it for cheap, she said.

“I thought it was the answer to all my prayers,” Turlay told the Idaho Statesman inside her brightly lit Kuna yoga studio. “He guaranteed it for life, said that epoxy floors would be perfect and that it would withstand everything that I needed.”

Turlay, 28, handed Michael F. Rose, owner and operator of M Rose Restoration, a $1,500 check as a deposit. She also agreed to provide a membership credit valued at $1,100 for his son, she said. Rose told her the job, quoted at $5,000 in an invoice dated September 2021 that she provided to the Statesman, would take just a few days.

But delays, and excuses, began to pile up, Turlay said.

Turlay would later find out that when he provided her an invoice, his contractor license had been invalid for seven months. Rose lost his license as part of a state disciplinary action against him. And she’d come to learn she is far from the only one to fall victim to Rose’s business practices, including his signed admission he violated rules governing his license.

“Initially, before I knew about his history, I just thought he was just a bad contract worker, thought he kind of took some shortcuts and was being lazy,” Turlay said. “Now that I know more about Michael, I’m sure he did it maliciously.”

Dispute, default judgment

In the days after Turlay paid the deposit, she said, Rose told her he would need to postpone because of supply issues, and asked for another $1,000 to buy more materials, which, she said, she gave him.

After what grew into a six-week delay, Turlay said, Rose began work on the project. When he reached out again to tell her it was finished, she said, Rose said the death of a relative forced him to head out of state unexpectedly, and requested to be paid the remaining balance. And instead of the membership credit, Rose asked Turlay for another $2,500 in its place, she said.

When Turlay got back into the studio and saw the work, she said, it wasn’t at all what they’d discussed and only partially complete. The studio was unusable, Turlay said, unsafe to her teachers and clients. The subfloor was left exposed, uneven, with nails and shards of metal sticking out from the wood, which the Statesman observed during a visit to her studio. The issues created potential liabilities for Turlay and her business, she said.

Reached by phone, Rose acknowledged giving up his contractor’s license, which state records showed was pulled in February 2021. But he disputed Turlay’s assertions about the work he did on her yoga studio floor.

“We did exactly what we had told her we would do,” Rose told the Statesman. “When it came time to get paid the balance, she refused to pay it. But the project was completed.”

When Rose again asked for the remaining money, Turlay said, she repeated that she was dissatisfied with his work and it would need to be redone. That’s when Rose became verbally abusive and threatened to sue her and place a lien on her business, Turlay said. Rose rejected the allegation to the Statesman, calling it “absolute nonsense.”

Fearing for her employees and workers, Turlay said she spent more money to have the locks changed, after Rose left without returning a key she loaned him for the job. Based on her total financial losses, Turlay took Rose to small claims court, where an Ada County judge awarded her $3,150. She said she has yet to see a dime of that money.

Stated victims ‘coming out of the woodwork’

The Meridian Police Department maintains a stack of complaints filed against Rose, 56, accusing him of felony grand theft for allegedly defrauding area homeowners out of tens of thousands of dollars. At least nine of his former customers later won small claims judgments against him, mostly on default after Rose either submitted excuses for why he couldn’t attend, or just didn’t bother to show up, court records showed. The Statesman spoke with six of those former customers.

The jobs Rose allegedly walked away from, with thousands in deposits and fees for materials, included interior and exterior house painting, kitchen remodels and — more recently — his stated specialty: epoxy floors.

Like Turlay, Stephanie Nichols, 34, said she found Rose through Facebook in April 2020 when she went looking for a company to lay down an epoxy coating on the floor of her three-car garage. Her family had recently moved into their Meridian home, and Nichols said she wanted to surprise her husband with the upgrade.

But by June, Nichols, a Treasure Valley real estate agent, reported Rose to police for allegedly following her and posting online threats of violence against her and her family after she left a negative review about his company, according to a police report reviewed by the Statesman. When the harassment didn’t stop, police arrested Rose in July 2020 on suspicion of violating a protection order issued by a court.

Rose pleaded guilty to misdemeanor disturbing the peace, served five days in jail and received two years of probation that lapsed earlier this month. He told the Statesman he agreed to the charge because of a persistent heart condition known as atrial fibrillation, or AFib, that he said is worsened by stress. Rose provided the Statesman with a picture of himself laying in a hospital bed hooked up to an IV and with several monitors on his bare chest.

“I already served my time and my probation for that,” Rose told the Statesman, denying he ever threatened Nichols. “I paid for an ankle bracelet to stay away from a woman that I didn’t know other than there was a client who was attacking my business constantly.”

Nichols recalled it differently.

“It was weeks of absolute hell,” she told the Statesman by phone. “I’ve never been through anything like that in my life.”

Earlier that year, in January 2020, Rose also was involved in a fight at a bar in Meridian, a police report obtained by the Statesman through a public records request showed. The police report from the alleged bar fight noted that the officer’s check “also revealed Michael possibly goes by the name Michael Fredrick Crump.”

Rose wasn’t arrested or charged in the case.

Nichols’ story about Rose is similar to several others. After she initially messaged him, Rose showed up and estimated the garage floor project at $1,750, according to an invoice she provided to police — and that Rose provided to the Statesman. Rose asked for a $600 deposit up front, which she said she paid him with a credit card, according to the police report.

To prepare for the day he was scheduled to come back for the job, Nichols cleared the garage, Nichols told the Statesman, including dragging heavy outdoor freezers out to the side yard. That day, she said, Rose postponed. The same ordeal happened several times, she said.

First it was that Rose hurt his knee, Nichols said. Then he said one of his parents died and he had to leave town. Then he said he ran into supply issues at the store, she said.

“It was excuse, after excuse, after excuse why he couldn’t come,” Nichols said. “And it was like, ‘If he can’t get it done, we just want our money back.’ I tried addressing it with him, and he got super kind of snappy and aggressive.”

When Rose finally got around to the job, the work was subpar and not the agreed upon color, Nichols said. Rose lied about the quality of the materials he used, she said. The epoxy never dried, and epoxy splotches were left on the recently painted baseboards and walls of the garage, she said.

Rose blamed the damage on Nichols, he told the Statesman, because he said she drove on the garage early — before the three- to five-day window needed to allow the epoxy to fully cure. Nichols said Rose told them it would dry within a day, and even when they pulled their cars in for the first time after a week, the surface peeled off like nail polish and stuck to their vehicle tires.

Through her tears, Nichols said, Rose assured her the floor would look as they discussed once it dried. The Nicholses basically paid Rose the other $1,150 just to get him to leave, she said.

After Rose initially agreed to come back and fix the project, Nichols said, he backed out and told her that he didn’t care, to go ahead and sue him. She did, and the Nicholses were awarded about $4,700, court records showed, which included the costs to hire another company to repair the damage Rose caused and redo the floor, Nichols said. Rose has never paid any of it, she said, which Rose acknowledged.

“I don’t know what they want,” Rose said, suggesting he just planned to file bankruptcy. “If it’s money, they should have thought about that before they shut down my business.”

Nichols filed reports with Meridian police and the Idaho attorney general’s office. But it was after she posted her review for Rose’s business Koating Kings Epoxy Floors & Painting Co., she said, that he became irate and the threats began.

That’s also, she said, when dozens of people started contacting her to say they went through similar experiences as her after they hired Rose to do improvement work at their homes, too.

“People were coming out of the woodwork,” Nichols said. “There were so many people on there, and what’s sad is some people messaged me that: ‘I’m not going to comment on your post, because I’m afraid of him. But I went through the same thing.’ ”

Six businesses, same results

Bidal Moreno said he also ended up a target of Rose’s demeaning behavior and repeated threats.

In February 2019, Moreno said, he accepted a job he saw on Facebook to paint houses for Rose with his company Eagle Mountain Painting Co. Moreno told the Statesman he had a little bit of experience but never worked as a professional house painter, and Rose didn’t offer any training — or much in the way of direction at the worksites.

Moreno, 57, who is deaf, said Rose initially paid him his hourly wage in cash. But over the course of his one month working on four different Treasure Valley homes, Moreno noticed that Rose rarely appeared at the job site, and he became suspicious. When Rose did show up, Moreno said, he wore a holster with a handgun on his hip, which Rose confirmed to the Statesman.

Not long after, Moreno said, Rose continued to put him off about pay, and he said he was eventually owed more than $1,000. After Rose’s recurring promises of pay went unfulfilled, Moreno said, he walked off the job and Rose dared him to sue. Moreno did, and won a default judgment for nearly $1,200 that May.

Rose said he didn’t show up for court because of his recurring heart issues, which by then started to present as anxiety.

“As soon as my adrenaline would flow, my AFib would go crazy,” Rose said. “I didn’t go to the hearing, intending on just filing bankruptcy on all of it.”

Moreno said he’s still owed the money, and has frequently traded barbs online with Rose, who has responded in posts that Moreno is merely a disgruntled former employee, according to social media posts. In text messages that Moreno provided to police as part of their report, Rose sent insults about Moreno’s disability along with repeated threats, including that he knows where Moreno lives and to “watch your 6” — a military phrase meaning watch your back.

“You made the list, gimp,” Rose messaged Moreno, according to the texts reviewed by police and included in their report reviewed by the Statesman. “Wait til we cross paths, a---hole. I’m going to give you a f----ing nap.”

Moreno said he thinks Rose, who also takes gigs locally playing in a rock band under the name M Rose & The Weary, still deserves to face consequences for his actions.

“I do think he should be punished for it,” Moreno said by phone, through an interpreter. “Because he’s still doing the dirty business. There were several people filing complaints against him, so he’s not learned his lesson.”

Rose and his wife, Nariah Siba Rose, previously lived in Riverside County, California, with their children, according to court and other public records. At the time, their names were Michael Fredrick Crump and Siba Talal Crump before changing their names to Michael Fredrich Rose and Siba Talal Rose in February 2010, as well as changing the names of their children, Riverside County Superior Court records showed. In March 2017, Rose’s wife changed her name again to her current name, according to the records.

Since arriving in Idaho, Rose has operated under at least six business names, including M Rose Restoration, Eagle Mountain Painting and Koating Kings, rotating through them per job. A review by the Statesman of his company Facebook pages showed Rose most recently conducted business under the names American Epoxy Pros and Gem State Epoxy Pros after customers posted negative reviews for some of the prior companies.

All the while, a growing number of residents said that Rose either performed shoddy work — often doing thousands of dollars in damage to their homes in the process — or just never showed back up again after they paid him a deposit, which he just pocketed, the residents told the Statesman. Several of Rose’s customers filed complaints with the attorney general’s office, as well as Meridian police.

After the police department’s investigation, in which officers noted every time that the report related to a string of similar suspected fraud cases, they turned it over to the Ada County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office in fall 2020. But the case didn’t lead to criminal charges.

“The reports were submitted for our review for grand theft. However, the conduct did not meet the criminal standard for theft while he was licensed,” Emily Lowe, spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office, told the Statesman by email, declining to say why. “We’re not comfortable making more specific comments about the facts.”

Civil judgments go unpaid

When the repeat small claims judgments and Meridian police investigation led to limited consequences for Rose, six alleged victims filed complaints with the consumer protection division of the attorney general’s office. Those complaints against Rose were forwarded onto the Idaho Division of Occupational and Professional Licenses, which opened an investigation.

Sebastian Ziegler, 38, of Meridian, filed one of the complaints. He hired Rose in January 2020 to install an epoxy floor in his garage for $1,800. He wound up paying another company $2,800 to fix the damage he said Rose created, and to complete the work correctly. Ziegler later won a $4,700 judgment against Rose in small claims court, and also has yet to see any of that money, he said.

Rose said once Ziegler joined a group of his former customers after him for refunds, he cut ties and declined to address problems they raised with his work. Rose committed to providing the Statesman with the names and contacts of other customers with whom he resolved issues on their epoxy floors, but did not do so.

“Once they started attacking me with (Nichols), there wasn’t any communication anymore,” Rose said. “I couldn’t remedy the situations, as I have with so many other clients.”

After winning his case, Ziegler told the Statesman he spoke with a lawyer about getting paid. The lawyer, Ziegler said, told him the judgment was worth about as much as the paper it was printed on, because of the inherent challenges to forcing those found responsible to pay.

“He told me I can take this judgment and hang it on the wall,” Ziegler recalled in an interview, “because I’d spend more money paying the lawyer than the money I would get out of it.”

Lisa Frederick, previously of Star, is another former Rose customer who said she never recovered money from him either.

Frederick, 59, filed a small claims lawsuit in February 2020 seeking her $950 deposit back on a small kitchen remodel she hired Rose the prior March to complete. After five months of delays, she told police that he only did the job halfway, according to a police report. During her legal process, Frederick told the Statesman, she heard from the “Judge Judy” show about resolving the situation on TV.

“I agreed to go on the show, but they couldn’t find him to see if he wanted to appear so that was dropped as well,” Frederick said.

To collect on his judgment, Ziegler said, he went to the Canyon County Sheriff’s Office, because Rose was living in Nampa at the time. A deputy tried to collect from the last bank where Rose previously wrote a check, but a teller reported no current accounts existed under Rose’s name, Ziegler said.

Ziegler said he’s committed to ensuring others don’t become Rose’s next victims.

“It’s my goal to stop this, his business practices,” Ziegler said. “Because I know that he’s continuing to install epoxy garage floors and doing remodel jobs in the valley here. I’m sure people hire him because people don’t have a lot of money and want to save money and hire him, and it’s a total loss.”

In January 2021, the state’s professional licenses division took action against Rose, based on its investigation. Rose agreed to give up his individual contractor’s license, and also pay more than $4,200 in fines within two years.

Those fines would be turned over to collections if they went unpaid, an agency spokesperson told the Statesman by email. But he said he is not permitted to say whether Rose has paid those fines, because the information is exempt from disclosure and could be part of a future investigation — if one takes place.

Rose told the Statesman he didn’t pay the fine by the required Jan. 8 deadline.

“I haven’t been able to,” he said. “That’s just going to be in my bankruptcy.”

Social media posts detail work

Idaho law requires all contractors be licensed to perform work valued at more than $2,000. As part of Rose’s agreement with the state’s licensing board, he signed off that the discipline applied to him, all of his assumed business names and “anyone holding an interest in (the) respondent shall be ineligible to obtain any registration” as a contractor until his fines are paid.

On May 5, 2022, Nariah Rose was granted an individual contractor’s license by the state professional licenses division, agency records showed. The Facebook pages for American Epoxy Pros and Gem State Epoxy Pros each at one time included the phone number listed on her license.

Michael Rose told the Statesman he transferred his Gem State Epoxy Pros business over to the couple’s 20-year-old son. An amended certificate of assumed business name filed April 28 of last year with the secretary of state lists the Roses’ son under Nariah Rose’s ownership of the business, before she held a contractor’s license.

On each company’s Facebook page, the Roses promoted their work with purported before-and-after photos and videos of residential garage floors and commercial spaces.

In a video posted to the American Epoxy Pros page on April 4, Michael Rose is seen performing work on an epoxy floor. In another from April 19, Michael Rose introduces two of the couple’s children in the video as “the bosses” on a different garage epoxy floor job site. Nariah Rose does not appear in either of the videos.

“Check this out guys, I wanted to show you what the A-team does,” Michael Rose said, narrating the Facebook video reviewed by the Statesman. “We’ve seen the competition, across the street. That was not good.”

A since removed May 7 Facebook post advertised “Best Floors @ the Best Price!” and “Guaranteed 4 Life! Call Now,” listing Micheal Rose’s phone number.

In a May 13 post on the Gem State Epoxy Pros Facebook page — also removed since the Statesman contacted Michael Rose — he appeared in a photo with a shop vacuum working in a residential garage. Another post from May 29 showed a finished epoxy garage floor, advertising its cost as $3,000.

“Don’t hire an unlicensed fly by night company,” the May 29 post read. “We are license(d), bonded and insured.”

Operating without a contractor’s license is a misdemeanor, and complaints must be filed with a different enforcement agency, said Lowe with the Ada County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office. Cases in Meridian are handled by the Boise City Attorney’s Office. A Boise city spokesperson told the Statesman by email that no such complaints have been filed.

No additional complaints since those original six in 2020 have been filed with the attorney general’s consumer protection division, an office spokesperson told the Statesman.

The Division of Occupational and Professional Licenses spokesperson told the Statesman that he cannot say whether Rose is under additional investigation, as all complaints, investigations, informal actions or possible violations of an existing disciplinary action are exempt from disclosure under Idaho’s public records law.

‘This guy should be in jail’

The Roses’ Facebook videos and posts continue to infuriate past customers, including Ziegler and Nichols, as well as Cody Usabel. Usabel said he and his wife refinanced to take out $30,000 in home equity to complete some improvements on their three-bedroom, two-bathroom, single-family house in Meridian. They hired Rose to paint the interior and exterior of their house.

In total, the Usabels said, they paid him $6,850 over about two months in spring 2019. The Usabels also paid to rent a mobile storage unit that sat outside the residence to store their furniture and other items, and spent money for several nights at a hotel while painters worked, Cody Usabel said.

Rose ended up delaying the project for months with repeated excuses, Cody Usabel said, including the death of a family member — eating further into the Usabels’ home improvement budget. A separate contractor the Usabels hired to lay down a new interior floor also was held up for weeks waiting on Rose to complete his portion of the work, he said.

“It was a … disaster,” Cody Usabel, 38, told the Statesman by phone. “We had all these things timed out, and he wouldn’t show up.”

Desperate, the Usabels gave Rose more money to entice him back to do the work, and Rose finally showed up. But when he did, he failed to tape off fixtures as he sprayed paint around the interior of the home, Usabel said. Excess spray also hit windows and ruined baseboards that wound up having to be replaced, he said. To this day, the exterior painting Rose completed just peels off because he didn’t first powerwash the house, Usabel said, providing the Statesman with several close-up photos of the interior and exterior of his home.

Rose denied Usabel’s accusations. He provided the Statesman with two wide-shot exterior photos of the Usabels’ home that showed it had been newly painted.

“That’s an absolute lie,” Rose said. “I had his house almost done, and the guy calls and says he’s not going to pay me.”

By the end, Usabel said, they basically felt like they paid Rose to come wreck their house. Since he did the work, they’ve had to look in numerous areas at their old beige interior peeking through the neutral gray paint that Rose sprayed everywhere, including on several of their overhead light fixtures, Usabel said.

“It’s not just one bad spot,” he said. “It’s bad spots on every wall of the home.”

Other damage remains, Usabel said, and they’ll eventually have to pay someone to redo much of the work — money they don’t have at the moment. For now, they just have to live in the mess they say Rose left behind.

Usabel is angry at what he called a system that can’t seem to stop people like Rose, who he said scammed him and his wife, from defrauding others. That’s in spite of the couple’s various efforts to keep Rose from continuing to do contract work, including filing a police report and winning nearly $7,500 in a default small claims judgment that’s never been paid, Cody Usabel said.

“I don’t owe them any money,” Rose said. “That house was all but done.”

The Usabels hired a local attorney during the process. Through the attorney’s research, she found that Rose keeps his limited assets in his children’s names to avoid collections, according to an email that Usabel provided to the Statesman. Rose denied the premise.

Cody Usabel remains incensed by what he characterized as the lack of any level of enforcement to prevent Rose from continuing to defraud the next customer who falls into the same trap. “There’s nothing legally you can do to go after this guy, which blows my mind,” he said. “This guy should be in jail. He’s defrauding person after person, and should be arrested.”

Turlay, the Kuna yoga studio owner, said her experience has been the same, so she felt compelled to get the word out about Rose and the prolonged ordeal she went through with him that could have sunk her new business. To stay open, Turlay found a custom-padded floor that holds up well to her hot yoga classes, but at a cost of more than $5,000 — meaning an initial expense nearly double what she budgeted to get her first attempt as a small business owner back on track.

But Turlay hasn’t forgotten the trauma she said Michael Rose caused her, and seeks to help others avoid going through it next.

“It made me really determined to stop him,” she said. “This isn’t just, ‘Michael’s a bad contractor.’ This is, ‘Michael’s a questionable human.’ He’s quite charming at first, so when people meet him … it just worries me that they’re going to (fall) victim to some other scam, because he is a scam artist. He is a con man through and through.”

How to verify a contractor’s license

Contractors in Idaho must list their license number on written estimates. To verify if an independent contractor is actively licensed, visit the Idaho Division of Occupational and Professional Licenses search page and click “Contractors” in the drop-down menu and then choose the license type: https://apps.dopl.idaho.gov/DOPLPublic/LPRBrowser.aspx