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
