No'l Hell

The McCarley family gathered last year for an uncertain Christmas Eve.
Betty McCarley said the group still grieved over the death of her mother, who had presided over the annual holiday reunions. She had been a nearly permanent part of their daily life, living only five minutes away from their Quail Valley home in Missouri City.

However, they also had cause for celebration. Their son James was home from Austin. And they could now smile about the problem with his pickup truck, an ordeal that had concluded with one of those surprise happy endings rivaling any cheery Christmas story.

Or so the McCarley family thought, sitting there on that festive holiday night.

James McCarley’s prolonged problems over his pickup started long after his seemingly routine shopping trip on March 19, 1997.

He drove to the Professional Car Care garage in Missouri City and bought a new Explorer tire for the 1994 Nissan truck owned by his parents. He wrote a check for the $62.65 bill for the tire, a wheel balance and valve stem.

Four months later, the pickup vanished from in front of the McCarley home. Betty McCarley called police to report an auto theft, but the case was no mystery to officers. Professional Car Care had exercised its legal right to seize the truck for payment of the tire cost, because McCarley’s check had bounced.

The next day, on July 28, the McCarleys received a demand letter from Car Care owner Richard Armstrong. He informed them that the car would be sold unless they paid up. And the bill had increased from the $62 price of the tire. Now there also was the $25 overdraft charge, $75 for the mechanic’s lien — and $850 for the repo man. The total: $1,012.

The McCarleys said they were astounded. They said they received no warning, no indication of any bounced check or mechanic’s lien action, and would have paid promptly if anyone had contacted them. Armstrong disputes that, saying the bank would have contacted the son, and that Armstrong himself called repeatedly and left a message that was unanswered.

With James in need of transportation to get to work, Betty McCarley tried to negotiate the price down to $300. Armstrong would not bend, arguing that the full amount was needed to cover his own costs for the repossession.

“He was rude, he was arrogant, and he threatened to have my son arrested for writing a bad check,” Betty McCarley said. “I told him there were no attempts to defraud anyone of money. We just made a mistake.”

For the McCarleys, it was time to end the dispute. Looking more like a hostage negotiator than an attorney, their representative arrived at Armstrong’s business carrying $1,012 in cash. Armstrong was not present. No other worker wanted to be responsible for that amount of cash, so they referred him to the Carstar storage lot in Houston, which was holding the truck.

A Carstar employee brought out the Nissan and demanded payment — not the $1,012, but only $204, the cost of the storage. The McCarleys’ attorney gladly paid, and even sent cashier’s checks to Armstrong for $87 to cover the tire and returned check charge.

The family had the truck and more than $800 back. If not a pre-yule miracle, it was at least a bit of welcome relief.

On that 1997 Christmas Eve, four months after the truck’s return, they slept peacefully even while others didn’t. At 2:37 a.m., there was rustling outside, noises signaling the arrival of no sleigh nor reindeer. Rather, it was a repo man. Without so much as a Ho Ho Ho, he hitched up the truck and hauled it away.

This time around the pickup truck war has turned Ram tough. The McCarleys are suing.

Attorneys William Emmons and Daniel Jackson filed a state district court action in Fort Bend County, seeking the cost of the truck and punitive damages. They allege fraud, deceptive trade practices, wrongful conversion of the McCarleys’ property and trespass while seizing the Nissan. The suit seeks to block the auction of the Nissan.

Armstrong, who never cashed the cashier’s checks when the truck was released in 1997, sent a December 26 letter demanding more than $2,300 in doubled repo and lien fees and attorney bills. Their suit targets Armstrong, his business, repo man Clark M. Chrisman Jr. and his Mechanic’s Adjustors Inc. of Houston.

The McCarley family does not challenge the mechanic lien’s law, which enables automotive shops to seize the vehicles to satisfy debts of customers who pay with invalid credit cards or insufficient checks. However, Jackson says the second repossession was an abuse of that law. And the charges for seizing a vehicle must be reasonable — Jackson says $850 for a repossession, and twice that much for two, is blatantly excessive.

The case has forced Armstrong to disclose documentation for the costs, although those records consist of little more than two slips of paper from Chrisman, each marked with $850 and “PD” stamped at the top.

Armstrong says he paid Chrisman in cash — a common practice in the repo field — and tells of extensive work by him and repo agents trying to track the truck down, including the use of a recovery firm in Austin.

Troubling to the McCarleys is the disclosure by Chrisman that he paid a mysterious “secret phone service” to obtain long distance numbers of calls from the family’s telephone line. In his deposition, the repo agent said he could not remember the contact or name of the “service.” Jackson says it may be illegal.

Armstrong says he is “not familiar on how he [Chrisman] works,” although he admitted in the deposition that he has done business with him for about 15 years.

The Professional Car Care owner said repossessions are the last things he wants to do. At this point, the $20,000 would not be enough to compensate him for his time spent on a case involving a truck with nearly 130,000 miles on it.

But why a repossession on Christmas? “That was just the day the repossessor picked,” he said. “We had to get the truck sometime.”

Betty McCarley, who is suing for mental anguish, says the actions of Armstrong and his repo squad have frightened her family. “My own dogs’ barking scares me. The sound of the squirrels walking on my roof keeps me up at all hours. I feel so violated.”

In the meantime, the dispute is heading to trial. A judge will soon decide if the McCarleys owe the $2,300 charge, or if the defendants are liable for unspecified damages for a Christmas ruined.

Either way, the bills already exceed $62.

E-mail Russell Contreras at russell_contreras@houstonpress.com.