Last month, a Utah woman need some concrete work done in her backyard, so she hired a handyman named Berklee Holm. He told her the job would cost $4,200 but he needed $2,100 up front for materials.

No problem there. She wrote him the check.

Except she made a mistake: Her check included another zero. It was for $21,000. (I assume she didn’t write out the amount by hand.)

In a normal situation, Holm would’ve let her know of her error, they would’ve had a good laugh about it, and then he would have received the correct amount.

Holm didn’t do that. Instead, he deposited the check that same day. Then he stopped responding to the woman’s calls. He obviously didn’t complete the work in her backyard.

Police confronted him about it last week and he admitted the theft. Check out his explanation, though:

“He advised that once he saw the amount he ‘basically thanked the lord and put it in my (his) account,’” [officer Darren] Richmond wrote in the statement. Holm reportedly confirmed that he did not make any attempts to return the money.

Leave it to a religious person to assume a mistaken check is a gift from God rather than human error that could easily have been corrected.

Now he faces jail time.

According to the St. George News,

Holm was placed under arrest on Friday and booked into the Washington County Purgatory Correctional Facility for theft of mistakenly delivered property and a cash-only warrant. His bail was $10,000.

No word yet on if he believes this is also part of God’s Plan.

For what it’s worth, Holm appears to have a habit of not doing work he’s been paid for. In those previous instances, however, the most the customers could do was leave a bad review. This time he got greedy and paid the price for it.

(Thanks to Robert for the link)

