Plumber sues over fallout from work truck used in ISIS video

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”.

A Texas plumber whose branded truck somehow ended up in an ISIS propaganda video past year, as a literal vehicle of terror, filed a $1 million lawsuit last week against the Ford dealer who first bought the auto from him.

The lawsuit says the dealer didn’t remove the Mark-1 decals as promised before shipping the vehicle to Turkey. He says his secretary dropped a bombshell on December 17, 2014 when she called as he drove to Corpus Christi.

The image was tweeted by one Caleb Weiss, who said the F-250 was operated by Chechen fighters in the “Jaish al Muhajireen wal Ansar”, one of the rebel groups fighting against the Syrian government.

In addition to being grilled by federal officials, Oberholzer says his buisness has suffered due to the publicity of seeing his company vehicle in the hands of jihadists, he has lost employees, and had to shut down his business for a week due to the harassment.

The case claims: “By the end of the day, Mark-1’s office, Mark-1’s business phone, and Mark’s personal cellphone had received over 1,000 phone calls from around the the nation”.

He said his firm in Texas City was swamped with phone calls – many of them accusing him of being a terrorist sympathiser and some containing death threats – when the tweet was posted and widely re-tweeted a year later.

The plumber said his secretary was too scared to go to the office and that he was afraid for himself and his family, so he traveled to McCallen to escape the backlash.

According to the New York Post, at the time he had no idea that the dealership would never actually remove the stickers when they sold the truck on to its new owner.

Court records say Oberholtzer has sold up to 10 other company trucks around Texas and was used to the dealers taking off his name. The video and media attention threw his life into turmoil, Oberholtzer says. He had a visit from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and from the Department of Homeland Security.

An episode on The Colbert Report, a news show hosted by Stephen Colbert, featured Mr Oberholtzer’s old truck when it “began with the segment “Texan’s Truck in Syria”. “The episode was watched by 2.481 million viewers, making it the most watched episode ever in the show’s history”, the complaint states.

A photo of the truck, with his Mark-1 Plumbing decals still attached, went viral, leading to thousands of harassing phone calls. He is represented by Craig Eiland in Galveston.

He is seeking more than $1million in punitive damages for “fraud, gross negligence, negligent misrepresentation, defamation, invasion of privacy and deceptive trade” from defendant Charlie Thomas Ford Ltd. dba AutoNation Ford Gulf Freeway.

AutoNation did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday (NZ time).