Pueblo woman still jumping through hoops for payment after car damaged at Dairy Queen
PUEBLO, Colo. (KRDO) - Over a month ago, Sherrie Casarez was sitting in the drive-thru line at Dairy Queen waiting for ice cream when strong winds blew sheet metal from an awning onto her car.
"It was a little bit scary," Casarez said, recalling the event.
Thankfully, no one was hurt. Her newly purchased car was dinged up, but it was still drivable.
"I just thought, you know, it would just be a small insurance claim. The owner would call me and say he wanted to make it right. We would go through insurance, and then that would be pretty easy," Casarez said.
However, the reality has been far from that simple or fast.
Casarez said the owner, Warren Diodosio, never reached out after the location's manager assured her that he would. Instead, that manager became the middleman who relayed the first request for the damage to be fixed. Casarez was told that she needed to get three quotes from three different auto body shops.
Once Casarez got the quotes, she dropped them back off at the same DQ and waited to hear back from the owner.
"It was three weeks after it happened. He finally called me. That was the first time I heard from him, and he said that the quotes that I received were a little bit high," Casarez said that he told her to get a quote from Dans Paint & Body, a fourth quote. However, when she arrived at the shop off 4th street, Casarez found the lights off and the front door locked. They are closed through April 19th, further delaying the process.
"I brought up insurance. I said, well, who are we going to go through insurance? Like, how are we gonna do this? He said, no, I don't process anything through my business insurance. I will not make a claim on my business insurance," Casarez said.
On top of that, Casarez says, after her insurance told her it could take up to a week for a shop to fix the damage, she asked the owner about covering a rental car so she could still get to work and pick up her child from school.
"He said, well, that's really not my problem. That's going to be up to you to figure out. And so that's kind of when I figured, you know, this wasn't going to be an easy process," Casarez said.
She tells KRDO13 it was that call that made her think the problem might never get solved.
"[I'm thinking] pretty much that we're not going to get a resolution, really, that I'm just going to end up either having to pay myself to fix it or it's never going to get fixed by him, which just doesn't make sense. It's his business. It was, you know, his property that ruined my car," she said.
"I've done everything he's asked me to do. I got the estimates. I have reached out to the shop that he wanted me to. Now they're closed until the 19th. So we're looking at another, you know, week and a half before I even get my car in the shop, and then, say it does work out, and I do take it to where he wants. I have to figure out how to get around, how to take my kids to school, come to work because he refuses to help me with any kind of transportation while my car's in the shop."
KRDO13 has attempted to call the owner of the Dairy Queen multiple times but have not been able to get a hold of him. If he does respond, this article will be updated.
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