A handyman who botched a wiring job at a home in The Villages has been ordered to pay the homeowner $10,000 in restitution.
Jeetendra Sukhu, 45, of Leesburg, is poised to escape criminal prosecution on charges of unlicensed electrical contracting and contracting without a license if he pays the restitution and successfully completes 12 months of probation.
A woman hired Sukhu, who was running a business called Jerry’s Handyman Services, in 2024 to renovate two bathrooms, including moving light switches and adding an additional light fixture, at her home in the Seneca Villas in the Village of Hemingway, according to a report from the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation. She had purchased the villa, constructed in 2008, earlier that month for $395,000.
The villa owner, who is from Ohio, told an investigator that in November, she discovered that Sukhu failed to properly wire one of the bathrooms. He failed to make a proper connection through a junction box, failed to protect wires from contact with metal studs and had floating wires wrapped only in electrical tape. In addition, there was no installation of ground fault receptacles and a ground wire was not completely secured in wire nuts. He hid the shoddy work behind drywall, the report said…