Texas plumber Mark Oberholtzer learned that the hard way and now he’s filed a lawsuit seeking million in damages after he’s been hit with death threats and struggled to get new business.
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“By the end of the day, Mark-1’s office, Mark-1’s business phone, and Mark’s personal cell had received over 1,000 phone calls from around the nation”, said the lawsuit.
The Times reported that Oberholtzer received “thousands of harassing and threatening phone calls” at the office from people who thought the plumber was a terrorist sympathizer. The terror truck trade also exploded into a national news story, and was even mocked by Stephen Colbert on his final episode of “The Colbert Report”, which ended up being the show’s most-watched episode ever, drawing almost 2.5 million viewers.
Instead, the pickup was sold with decals and all and shipped to Turkey where it was obtained by militants, the lawsuit said.
Earlier in the year Jonathan Schnauzer of the Foundation for Defence of Democracies said: “Toyota is the truck that jihadists use when they want to go to war”.
But jihadists aren’t tied exclusively to the Japanese brand.
The black Ford F-250 started life as a truck for a Texas-based plumbing company, carrying pipes, toilets and other ilk.
The suit from Mark Oberholtzer, of Texas City, doesn’t accuse Houston’s AutoNation Ford Gulf Freeway of trading the truck to terrorists directly.
The company hasn’t commented since the lawsuit was filed. One of Oberholtzer’s main contentions, however, is that he began to remove his decals while waiting to finalize his paperwork with Charlie Thomas Ford and was told to stop because it would damage the paint. According to the suit, Oberholtzer claims the dealership told him they’d remove the decal. Neither had responded as of Monday afternoon.
According to Carfax vehicle history reports, attached to the lawsuit as evidence, the truck was sold at an auction on November 11, 2013. Caleb Weiss tweeted the picture from a Jabhat Ansar al-Din Facebook account, and from there the Internet did what the Internet does best. It showed militants firing a heavy weapon from the bed of a truck with the Mark-1 company name on the front door. These phone calls included, but were not limited to, individuals who were: “(a) irate and yelling expletives at whomever answered the phone; (b) degrading to whomever answered the phone regarding their stupidity; (c) singing in Arabic for the duration of the phone call or voice message recording; (d) making threats of injury or death against Mark-1’s employees, family, children, and grandchildren in violent, lurid and grossly specific terms; and, (e) directing expletive-laced death threats to whomever answered the phone”.
Facebook Texas City plumber Mark Oberholtzer says he was harassed and had to temporarily shut down his business after the video came out.
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“Gee, thanks for the advice – I was nearly anxious when the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Homeland Security showed up”.
