Man accused of preying on forgetful senior in Martinez

MARTINEZ, Ga. (WRDW/WAGT) - A Murphy Village-area asphalt worker is accused of bilking an 80-year-old woman out of money in Martinez when she couldn’t whether she’d paid him earlier.

It’s among several recent reports of solicitors offering to perform asphalt-related services but leaving unhappiness in their wake.

In the Martinez case, some men came to the victim’s home in December 2022 saying they worked for American Asphalt and would be willing to perform some maintenance work on her house.

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They had her sign a contract on Dec. 15, 2022, according to deputies.

“The contract was difficult to read due to bad handwriting, but it had several numeric values written that advised $7,800.00, $1,700.00, and $6,200.00 for several services they would be providing for home maintenance,” a deputy wrote in an incident report.

The men conducted some work for her during December and asked for payment by check, deputies reported.

They came to her home several times during December and requested additional payments, deputies said.

Because she couldn’t whether she’d already paid them, she wrote them a new check.

She lost track and couldn’t all the checks she had written.

Her nephew learned there were a total of 12 checks written in December, totaling $49,200, and called deputies.

On Tuesday, authorities arrested Paul Joseph O’Hara, who lives just outside North Augusta near Murphy Village, and held him on a charge of exploitation and intimidation of the elderly as well as a bench warrant, according to Columbia County jail records. He was listed by deputies as a manager at American Asphalt.

He remained in jail Wednesday.

He’d also been listed as a suspect in a similar 2020 case. In that Harlem incident, a woman reported to deputies that her 80-year-old mother had been conned out of $300.

O’Hara isn’t the first door-to-door driveway and asphalt worker from Murphy Village – an Edgefield County enclave of so-called Irish travelers, descendants of nomads who left Ireland in the 1800s – to catch authorities’ attention.

For example:

The Aiken County Sheriff’s Office in April warned about door-to-door scammers in tar-covered coveralls who were paid by a few people blacktop their driveways, supposedly with materials left over from other jobs. The men made an excuse to leave and then never came back to perform the work.
Two Murphy Village residents were sought for questioning in March after they came to an Augusta home on Fashion Drive to repair a driveway. When the 85-year-old resident left one of the men alone in the living room for a moment, a bag of $15,000 in cash had vanished, along with the worker, deputies said.
One of those same men was blamed after a North Carolina resident complained in September that two men stopped by his house and offered to repair his driveway for a discounted price, but he was left with a mess.
Two Murphy Village men were arrested last December in Virginia for lacking sales permits after going door to door. They were offering to repair people’s driveways, claiming to have some hot tar left over from a previous job, according to police.