Man bilked elderly Wichitans of thousands in tree-trimming scam. He’s done this before
A 41-year-old man accused of swindling elderly, vulnerable Wichitans out of thousands of dollars for yard work that wasn’t performed, completed or fairly priced has been convicted by a jury of mistreating and stealing from them.
This isn’t the first time Brandon Dean Guffey has carried out this sort of fraud. He was tried in Sedgwick County District Court this week in a case similar to others police investigated a decade ago.
All of the victims were in their 80s or 90s and at least some struggled with diminished cognitive states because of advanced age or health conditions like dementia. In each instance, prosecutors say, Guffey tricked the victims out of a substantial amount of money by convincing them they hadn’t already paid for services, by overcharging them or by altering or filling out blank checks for the wrong dollar amount.
At his trial involving the most recent victims, Guffey and his lawyer contended he wasn’t guilty of two counts of mistreating a dependent adult — a form of elder abuse — and two counts of theft, all felonies. Jurors decided otherwise, though, and convicted him Thursday on all counts after about four hours of deliberations, the Sedgwick County District Attorney’s Office said by email.
Guffey pleaded guilty in 2014 to two other cases tied to yard work fraud and served time in prison, court records show. He finished a 43-month sentence connected to those and other crimes in 2017, Kansas Department of Corrections records say.
The victims of his latest scam were targeted between 2020 and 2022. They were both in their 90s, suffered from diminished mental capacity and lived alone. In both instances, Guffey showed up at their homes asking to trim their trees but did little to no work and stole from them without regard for their declining cognitive health, prosecutors said Wednesday during the closing arguments of the trial.
One victim, a 90-year-old woman, gave Guffey $60 in cash and a blank check to cover the remaining $20 of an $80 bill. But it was filled out and cashed for 100 times that amount — $2,000, according to evidence presented in court.
Guffey convinced the other victim, a 92-year-old man, to write more than $3,600 in checks by returning to his home several times and telling him he hadn’t yet paid for a job. Some of the checks in question were written to people other than Guffey, including his girlfriend, which prosecutors said made no sense if they were meant to pay for legitimate tree-trimming work.
The deceptions are similar to those in Guffey’s 2014 cases: In one of those, Guffey convinced an 86-year-old woman to pay $8,800 to cut down a pear tree — a job that should have cost about $400 — by repeatedly going back to her house and telling her she hadn’t signed a check, that other checks had bounced and that he needed more money to haul off limbs. In the other case, he told an 84-year-old woman who paid him for yard work to leave the “pay to” line of her $10 check blank and altered the amount to $1,000.
Guffey’s lawyer told jurors in her closing arguments Wednesday that “confusion leads to mistakes” and said no one but Guffey and the people who hired him know what their agreements were, what work might have been left to do and what payment arrangements were made because no one else was present for the conversations and transactions.
Guffey also claimed at least one of the payments from the 92-year-old man was a gift — the giving of which, while perhaps ill-advised, isn’t a crime, his lawyer said.
Neither of the elderly victims testified at the trial. The 92-year-old man died over a year ago, and the woman’s physical and cognitive health is so poor now that testifying wouldn’t have been possible, court records say. Law enforcement and prosecutors relied on what the victims told their family members about their interactions with Guffey, video surveillance camera footage that showed Guffey at the victims’ homes, bank transactions and other means to prove he was responsible.
Guffey will be sentenced on Nov. 1, the Sedgwick County District Attorney’s Office said. He was booked into the Sedgwick County Jail on Thursday after jurors handed down their verdicts, jail records show, and may end up with another prison term for his newest convictions.
District Judge Eric Williams presided over the trial.
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This story was originally published September 12, 2024 at 5:48 PM.
