At the time he turned his truck into the dealer, he started peeling the stickers off his truck, but a salesman stopped him, telling him it ‘would blemish the vehicle paint’ and ‘the dealership had something better for removal’, Oberholtzer said in a lawsuit in Harris County Court.
On December 17, 2014, Oberholtzer’s secretary called him to let him know that a member of the jihadi group Ansar al-Deen tweeted a ‘propaganda photograph’ with a message reading: ‘using plumbing truck against regime in #Aleppo’.
‘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 the around the nation. These phone calls were in large part harassing and contained countless threats of violence, property harm, injury and even death,’ Oberholtzer’s complaint said.
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.
After the photo and video went viral, ‘USA Today, CBS, NBC and Inside Edition’ requested interviews and the FBI and Department of Homeland Security stopped by to tell him ‘there are crazy people out there’ and that he should ‘protect himself’.
Oberholtzer’s complaint also mentions The Colbert Report’s final episode, which ‘began with the segment “Texan’s Truck in Syria”,’ which featured his truck and was the ‘most watched episode ever in the show’s history’.
A year later, Oberholtzer said he still gets threatening phone calls ‘whenever ISIS commits an atrocity that is reported nationally’.
Culled from UK Daily Mail
