Plumber sues Ford dealer after truck with company logo used by extremists in Syria

According to a tweet, the man's truck ended up in the hands of 'Muhajireen Brigade' in Syria

The black Ford F-250 started life as a truck for a Texas-based plumbing company, carrying toilets, pipes and other supplies. But then it was sold to a Ford dealership in Houston, and after that shepherded off to parts unknown. Until, that is, it appeared as the focal point of a tweet from a supposed extremist last December.

The photo indicated that the truck no longer carried ceramic parts; emerging from its cargo bed were a black-cloaked figure and an antiaircraft gun. According to the tweet, the truck was being used by Jaish al-Muhajireen wal-Ansar (the “Muhajireen Brigade”), an extremist group fighting the Syrian government.

Yet even with its function entirely transformed, the truck still bore the insignia of its past life, a decal that clearly read: “Mark-1 Plumbing.”

Underneath this large lettering was an equally clear label of the company’s phone number — a number that, after the photo went viral within days of posting, began ringing nonstop.

On the other end of these mostly caustic calls was Mark Oberholtzer, owner of Mark-1 Plumbing in Texas City, whose reputation rapidly went from small-business owner to terrorist sympathizer. He wasn’t the latter, of course, but the widely shared picture of his old truck spoke louder than his plaintive explanations.

“How it ended up in Syria, I’ll never know,” Oberholtzer told the Galveston County Daily News at the time. “I just want it to go away, to tell you the truth.”

Now Oberholtzer has filed a lawsuit against AutoNation Ford Gulf Freeway, the Houston dealership where he traded in the truck. According to the complaint filed last week, AutoNation misrepresented its intentions to remove the decal, causing Oberholtzer, his business and his family “severe harm.”

AutoNation did not immediately respond to The Washington Post’s request for comment. According to Courthouse News, the dealership’s sales manager did not respond to a phone message placed last week.

A spokesman for the company told the Huffington Post last December that “AutoNation was nothing but the pass-through for this vehicle” and had no involvement in its eventual arrival in the hands of Islamist militants.

The lawsuit claims that Oberholtzer started to peel the “Mark-1 Plumbing” decal off when a salesman told him that doing so would blemish the paint on the vehicle. The salesman, Edgar Velasquez, allegedly assured Oberholtzer that the dealership would remove the decal.

Washington Post