Decades-Old Grudge Leads to Torched Cars at Indiana Dealership
We've heard of holding grudges, but what happened at an Indiana car dealership recently has set our minds on fire.
Fort Wayne is where 79-year-old Dewey Frederick was apparently sufficiently fired-up by a 1986 sale that he lit four cars across two car lots owned by the O'Daniel Automotive Group ablaze.
Frederick purchased a Jeep from O'Daniel way back in the heyday of hair metal and claimed it had a bad engine and that the dealer group never rectified the situation. His long-simmering grudge led to $82,800 in damage, with a 2019 Jeep Compass, 2020 Jeep Cherokee, and 2013 GMC Acadia being torched. It all started with a road flare dropped into the Compass's fuel-filler line.
Apparently not content, Frederick drove to the other lot and dropped another road flare into a Pontiac Solstice, cutting the roadster's roof to do so.
Frederick's anger didn't just flare up after years on the back burner -- he apparently super-glued the locks on his Jeep way back in the day.
According to the Washington Post, Frederick was "charged Saturday with four counts of arson and now faces eight to 48 years in prison if convicted of all four felonies."
He also apparently said that "it was time for the chickens to return to roost".
Frederick's own return to the dealership appears to have ended with him getting roasted.
[Image: Mikbiz/Shutterstock.com]
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Tim Healey grew up around the auto-parts business and has always had a love for cars — his parents joke his first word was “‘Vette”. Despite this, he wanted to pursue a career in sports writing but he ended up falling semi-accidentally into the automotive-journalism industry, first at Consumer Guide Automotive and later at Web2Carz.com. He also worked as an industry analyst at Mintel Group and freelanced for About.com, CarFax, Vehix.com, High Gear Media, Torque News, FutureCar.com, Cars.com, among others, and of course Vertical Scope sites such as AutoGuide.com, Off-Road.com, and HybridCars.com. He’s an urbanite and as such, doesn’t need a daily driver, but if he had one, it would be compact, sporty, and have a manual transmission.
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People really don't understand where the problem is. And always burn the wrong guy. Dealer isn't even an employee of the manufacturer who is responsible for a bad design.
Noticed that when I tried to add a paragraph to a reply to another post above, the “return” key didn’t work!
It appears to be OK on a “root” post like this one.
Considering the rate of employee turnover at a typical car dealer, I doubt the parties responsible for ripping off the arsonist were in any way impacted by the crimes. Revenge may be a dish best served cold, but this one was too much, too late. O'Daniel Automotive Group makes no mention of ownership on its websites, suggesting that it is just another hedge-fund-held entity meant to provide the illusion of competition. It would have been much different 36 years ago.
Isn't one of the main arguments in favor of the dealer franchise by the NADA... customer service? Right.
This guy held a grudge for decades. To some extent, most of us are.