Johnny MacKay was bored Sunday night while his wife was at work so he decided to visit Vancouver’s Garage Bar & Grille.
He arrived about 9 p.m., had a few drinks, shot pool and listened to a few guys play guitar. He left around 10:30 p.m., taking an Uber home. He drove his wife’s car to work Monday morning and swung by the bar, 1101 W. Fourth Plain Blvd., to check on his pickup before heading to Portland International Airport, where he works in maintenance.
It was then, roughly around 6 a.m., that he saw his torched truck in the bar’s parking lot.
“I couldn’t believe it happened and that it was gone,” said MacKay, 41, of Vancouver. “It was surreal. Even still, I’m sad my truck is gone. That was my truck. That was my baby.”
The Vancouver Fire Department was dispatched about 2:30 a.m. Monday to the bar. Vancouver police officers were asked to respond shortly thereafter “to assist with a suspicious vehicle fire,” police department spokeswoman Kim Kapp said in an email.
According to Kapp, MacKay’s 2015 Nissan Titan was engulfed in flames when firefighters arrived.
The pickup “had ‘Trump’ spray painted on the left side, and coincidentally, had pro-Trump stickers on the bumper,” Kapp said.
The Vancouver Fire Marshal was called to investigate. Additional information about the fire was not immediately available.
MacKay said he believes someone torched his truck due to the pro-President Donald Trump stickers. He spoke to a witness who said there was an expletive spray-painted on the driver’s side before the word “Trump” that had been burned off in the fire.
“If politics and hate for Trump was the driving force behind it, that person needs help,” MacKay said.
MacKay put the two bumper stickers on his truck a few days before the fire. Both read “Trump 2020,” and one read “Make liberals cry again,” while the other read “Keep America Great.” Despite the bumper stickers — which MacKay said he thought were funny — he didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 and isn’t sure if he’s going to vote for him in 2020.
“I support Trump because he’s our president,” MacKay said. “When he was running for office, I didn’t think anything of him. I thought he was better than Hillary or Bernie.”
MacKay said he feels it’s his duty to support the president as an American and that’s where his Trump support comes from. He likes some of what Trump has done, he said, but not everything. MacKay said he typically abstains from national elections because he doesn’t feel like his vote matters. He votes in local elections and said he doesn’t lean toward one particular party.
“I have some conservative and liberal ideas,” he said. “I support the right to bear arms but also the right to choose.”
MacKay said that “because of increased tension and the importance of this next election,” he plans on voting in the 2020 presidential election but will wait to see who else is running before deciding if he’s going to vote for Trump.
In the meantime, MacKay said his truck is a goner.
Because his wife’s car doesn’t have four doors, he can’t use it to drive for Uber. MacKay was saving up for the holidays and to pay off credit cards. He said he started driving for Uber and Lyft within the last three months and was driving about six to 10 hours a night, five nights a week, in addition to his full-time job at the airport.
He still has a while to go before his truck is paid off, and MacKay said any insurance money he gets due to the fire will go to the lien company.
“I’m losing money on this,” he said. “I was trying to save up for Christmas.”
