A Washington, DC family bought a car to solve one problem and ended up with a much bigger one. Precious Only and her partner, Rayvon Jamison, purchased a vehicle from Beady Eye Auto Sales on Bladensburg Road last Thursday, hoping to get their family of six back on the road. Four days later, Jamison was in handcuffs.
The couple told ABC 7 News that police pulled them over on Monday and discovered the tags on their newly purchased car were fraudulent. When Jamison handed over the registration paperwork the dealership had given him, officers told him that document was fake too. He spent the night in jail facing charges including counterfeit tags and possessing a counterfeit vehicle registration.
Those charges have since been dropped, but the ordeal has left the family shaken and searching for answers the dealership doesn’t seem willing to give. When they returned to Beady Eye Auto Sales this week, employees reportedly covered the windows and refused to let them inside.
What makes this story worse is that this family isn’t alone. Reporters covering the story heard from dozens of other customers, many of them single mothers, who say they bought vehicles from the same dealership and ran into similar paperwork problems. Almost all of them describe being ghosted the moment they tried to get help.
A Dealership That Won’t Answer the Phone
Getting a straight answer out of Beady Eye Auto Sales has proven nearly impossible. Calls to the number listed on the shop’s own sign went straight to an automated message, and a call to the owner’s personal number went unanswered as well. For a business that was happy to sell a car and collect a payment, the silence afterward speaks volumes.
The District says it has already received a number of complaints about this dealership, which suggests this isn’t an isolated paperwork mix-up. When one bad set of tags shows up, that’s an error. When it shows up over and over, that starts to look like a pattern.
What Happens Next
The Office of the Attorney General is advising anyone who receives counterfeit tags to report it directly to the Metropolitan Police Department. MPD has confirmed it is looking into the dealership, though no details on the scope of that investigation have been released yet.
For Jamison and Only, the damage is already done. Jamison, who says he has worked hard to turn his life around, described the arrest as a painful setback for reasons that had nothing to do with anything he actually did.
“I’m not in the streets no more. For me to actually turn my life around and think it’s gonna be different, then get pulled over and arrested for something I know I didn’t do. Me trying to do right… Yeah, it’s bad,” he said.
There Should Be Consequences
Buying a car should be stressful in the normal ways: negotiating price, checking the odometer, wondering if you really need the extended warranty. It should not end with an innocent buyer spending a night in jail because the paperwork he was handed turned out to be worthless.
If the complaints piling up against this dealership are accurate, the real fraud here didn’t happen on the road. It happened at the sales counter.