A Texas plumber who was flooded with threats after his old truck — still emblazoned with his company’s name — was seen driven by ISIS thugs in Syria has armed himself and is suing a Ford dealer.
Mark Oberholtzer of Mark-1 Plumbing said a jihadi tweeted a photo of a fighter shooting an anti-aircraft gun on the Ford 2005 F-250 in December 2014 with the company logo and phone number still visible.
The nasty calls started pouring in, up to 200 a day.
“They were calling us ‘terrorists’ or ‘traitors,’ [threatening], ‘We’re going to come down there and do this.’ We had numerous death threats,” the 52-year-old from Galveston County told The Post.
In December 2013, Oberholtzer’s son went to AutoNation Ford Golf Freeway in Houston to trade in the 2005 truck for the 2012 model.
As he began peeling the company decals off the door, the salesman told him that it ruins the paint and to “let them handle it,” claims the lawsuit, filed Wednesday against AutoNation.
He was hunting in South Texas when his secretary called to say reporters wanted to know why his truck was being driven by ISIS terrorists.
Homeland Security officials questioned Oberholtzer and the FBI warned him to “protect himself.” He now always carries a gun.
“I lost work out of it,” he said, noting that while his regular clients knew he was a good guy, he has struggled to get new business.
Now the plumber wants $1 million in damages from the dealer, who sold the truck to a company in Turkey in 2013, records show.
“Yesterday I ran into a guy I used to work with, for the first time in five years. ‘Sell any trucks to Syria lately?’ he asked. Everybody thinks it’s funny, but it’s not,” he said.