David Mathias Jr was a general contractor who was building two homes in the Chapin, SC area. He refused to pay me ~$800 when I was in high school and I took it to small claims court and won. When I took him his first load of pine straw as a high school kid in my little Toyota truck, I was on time and he didn’t show up. I put the bales where I was supposed to and when I finished, I went and talked to the homeowner.
They gave me a bad feeling about Dave, a huge red flag. Dave didn’t show up to pay me or try and meet me to pay me, but instead ordered a second load of pine straw to be delivered to his second house under construction. On the second delivery, I dropped them, he didn’t show up and I really needed the money to pay for more pine straw. I was pissed and went to the homeowner of the second house, told him what was going on and how I felt like I was getting the run around and things didn’t “seem on the up and up” as mom says.
This homeowner could tell I was a young entrepreneur who wast trying to make an honest living. He offered to pay me for “his part.” He wrote the check. I remember telling dad about what was going on when I got home. We were in the car riding up Lake Murray Blvd and I remember Dad saying, “Get a pad of paper and write out an Incident Report. I deal with this kind of stuff all them time. You need to write it out, exactly what happened while it is fresh and in your head.” He said that he deals with this type of thing with the cases that he works. I did just that.
I took the next step and filled out the paper work to file a claim in small claims court. That was all that I could do. It wasn’t a ton of money, it was more on principal. He refused to pay me. He said I went around him and went directly to the client. Well, I did because he didn’t show up at all and wasn’t even talking about paying me. He didn’t even show.
I kept calling him. Back to back. One time when he answered the phone, he said that I had filled out the paperwork in the wrong name. “Everything is in my wife’s name anyway.” “you won’t get a dime” I delivered pine straw for him on a big job. Then, he didn’t pay but ordered another load of straw. I delivered that load and then he didn’t show to pay me like he said he would.
His truck was a big F250 that, like a typical drug addict, had the bumper bent and dinged up from where he had run into things messed up. So, when he didn’t show and was acting sketchy, I went back to the first home owner and knocked on the homeowner’s door and said, “I just delivered your pine straw and he is not paying.” The client didn’t act surprised at all.
He told me that he had all kinds of problems with David and wanted to know how much his portion of the bill was so he could pay me, and he would take it out of David’s check later. I looked up his family, found where David Mathias Sr lived. He lived in Adam Dox’s neighborhood, a good buddy of mine from High School. I asked my good buddy Adam about their family.
Word on the street was that there were two Mathias brothers and I was dealing with “the bad one” who was the problem child. He ended up throwing a rock at my truck when I went by his office to get paid. I retaliated by throwing a bigger rock into his glass door, shattering the glass. Oh, I guess I need to add him to my amends list to clear off my side of the street with him too…Gosh. That will be tough too, but I need to see my part and clear off my side of the street.
