SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (Dakota News Now) – Imagine it’s Labor Day weekend. You’re moving across the country from Chattanooga, Tennessee to Seattle — 2,521 miles — as you and your four-year-old son flee from a life of domestic violence. All in a car packed with all the possessions the two of you could fit.

The used 2008 Chevy Impala you bought less than a month ago after finalizing your divorce from your alleged abusive ex-husband breaks down on the interstate near Sioux Falls. You take it to an auto repair shop you’ve decided you trust, then pay $1,000 up front for repairs.

Now, imagine that over five months later, that car is still in Sioux Falls at a towing property, and you owe that business well over $1,000 — and $52 by the day — before it can go anywhere. Tack that on to the hundreds you spent renting a car to make it from Sioux Falls to Seattle, and a couple nights in hotel rooms along the way as you plotted your next move.

Oh, and add the $5,000 you still owe on the vehicle, and whatever it may cost to come back to Sioux falls and retrieve it, or to have it delivered. Of course, you don’t know if the car is fixed and you can’t do a thing with it because you have no idea of the location of the keys — the one you left to the trusted mechanic.

That is the thousands of dollars of mess Amanda Gallway finds herself in, all for trusting a tow driver and repair shop owner. Now living in Seattle, she hasn’t heard from Maga Motors of Tea in a few weeks, and certainly not since that 18-month-old business was evicted by owner Nice Place Holdings on Feb. 1.

“My car is being held hostage for money I don’t have sitting in the bank because I’m a domestic violence victim that fled and left and moved all the way from one corner of the country to another,” Gallway told Dakota News Now. “It cost us $10,000 just to get moved into a new house. I don’t have an extra $1,000 lying around…

“All that does is leave me in a bind upside down for something, and for what? I can get it out of the tow yard, and I can get it to another place, and I can get the work done to it. What I can’t do is pay the $1,000 tow bill, be out the $1,000 I spent on the engine — that I already paid for to Maga Motors — that I don’t know where it is. I need communication is what I need.”

When the car’s engine broke down in early September, Gallway called her free towing service, which connected her with a local tower. That driver recommended Maga Motors in Tea, whose website claims the business to be a “reliable small-town mechanic” and is “the only shop open on evenings and weekends.”

Gallway took the advice and met one of the owners, Tracy Hicks — who “seemed pretty down to earth” — and figured the car was in good hands, left it there, and rented a car to drive to her new residence in Seattle.

Gallway and Hicks communicated “several times” over the phone for a couple months. In November, Hicks messaged her he found the parts she needed, but the business was having issues with its shop and needed to re-locate.

“He said, ‘I’m having issues at my shop. I’m going to have to relocate my shop,’” Gallway said. “And, I said, ‘OK.’ And he said, ‘Are you okay with me taking your car to the new shop?’ and I said, ‘Yeah.’ And, he said, ‘listen, I’ve got four kids. We’re right here at Christmas. It’s probably going to be January or February before I get to your car, between the holidays and having to relocated everything from one place to another.’”

Gallway told Hicks that she worked at home and had another family car, and to not worry about this lag time.

“It’s an inconvenience, but it’s not the end of the world,” Gallway told Hicks. “I’m OK. If it’s February before I get my car, that’s fine. This wasn’t planned. My car’s in another state, and you’re being a huge help and I really appreciate it. That’s fine.”

At that point, Gallway had paid Hicks $1,000 toward the parts for the car, but nothing for labor.

Fast forward to three months later — Monday, Feb. 12. A friend of Gallway’s who still has the lien on the Impala — who owns a car lot in Georgia and is financing the vehicle — called Gallway to tell her she got a letter from Redi Towing in Sioux Falls. He sent the letter to Gallway.

”It said the car had been abandoned on private property for over thirty days and was towed at the owner’s expense,” Gallway said.

Redi is charging Amanda $52 a day for storage, and her bill there is well already over $1,000 in storage fees and towing, and climbing.

“I have my RV in storage in California and I pay $75 a month, to give you a price comparison of how outrageous $52 a day is,” Gallway said.

“So, right now, I’m in a situation where I don’t know where the keys to my car are. I don’t know if it has an old engine in it, or a new engine. I have not been given an update from the owner of Maga Motors, so I don’t know how much or any work has been done.”

She then tried to put details of her own story together. She called the South Dakota Department of Consumer Protection, which told her they couldn’t help because Maga Motors was not an auto dealership.

But, she was able to find out the owner of the property on which Maga Motors sat in Tea — Nice Place Holdings. The representative Gallway found, Jodi Adfinson, told Gallway that Maga Motors has been evicted from the property, and confirmed that to Dakota News Now on Monday, adding “I have received a judgement for the eviction.”

While plenty of her angst lies with Maga Motors, Gallway expressed extreme displeasure with the way Redi Towing, even though the man she spoke with there told him he would “call it even” if she gave him her keys and her title. Problem is, the keys are nowhere to be found (she left them with the mechanic) and the title is with the car’s owner, LNK Auto Sales, in Lafeyette, Georgia.

“I need Maga Motors and Tracy to communicate with me and tell me what condition my car is in, since he’s the person that whose hands were on it,” Gallway said. “I need my keys found and located, and I need permission to relocate my vehicle without having to pay extortion fees.”

Yes, Gallway used the word extortion.

She feels like Redi Towing is taking advantage of her because the Impala has Tennessee tags and the company knows she is in Seattle.

“I feel like somebody in South Dakota saw me as being an outsider and said, ‘Oh, here’s an easy one. It’ll be really hard for her to be able to take care of this because she’s not local,’” said Gallway.

Redi Towing declined to comment for this story. But Jessie Schmidt, the vice president of South Dakota’s Better Business Bureau, said Redi Towning isn’t doing anything wrong, that “they have to charge fees.”

Nice Place Holdings is also not at fault, Schmidt said, since the landlord “obviously has issues with the tenant” and doesn’t bare the responsibility of knowing where the cars are, or contacting their owners.

“The landlord needed that property to be income-producing, right,” Schmidt said. “And, those cars were a part of that. (They) needed to get them off that lot.”

The fault in Gallway’s mess, Schmidt said, lies in Maga Motors.

”Those aren’t good business practices — when you have somebody else’s car that they have entrusted to you, and now it becomes part of something bigger,” Schmidt said. “It’s unfortunate they didn’t reach out to her and let her know the situation they were in.”

Schmidt was then asked if Maga Motors was legally obligated to let Gallway know the car’s situation. She said “no.”

“It’s so unfortunate,” Schmidt said. “There’s so many unfortunate things about this whole situation and not how we want anybody that visits South Dakota to have a bad taste in their mouth.

“We’re better than all of these things that happened to this woman, and it’s heartbreaking because now she doesn’t have a car, she’s got a big bill and now what’s she going to do? She still owes money on this car. It’s just an awful situation, and it seems to be this tumbling effect of, she just gets in it deeper and deeper and deeper, and there’s just not a good outcome for her.”

Indeed, Gallway said the fiasco has “not put a great taste in my mouth for the state of South Dakota.”

Schmidt said Gallway could take Maga Motors to small claims court, where Gallway could represent herself and sue the owners for the cost of recovering her car, and any hard costs associated with getting her car back.

“And, maybe that’s worth it,” Schmidt said. “If she’s the bottom of a list of litigants, at that point, is there anything to go after?”

Gallway told DNN the state’s consumer protection agency told her that seven lawsuits have been filed against Maga Motors. DNN did not receive a call back from that agency for confirmation before this story was published.

Schmdit said this is a cautionary tale of how consumers should do stronger research on a business before doing business with it, and to notice red flags.

In the case, Schmidt said one of the red flags was the two-month lag time between when Gallway first took the car in on Labor Day weekend and the time when Hicks actually told her he had the parts to fix it. The next red flag came at that same moment, when Hicks told Gallway there were issues with the shop, and that it had to relocate, and that it would take yet another three months to have the car fixed.

For anyone reading this that finds themself in this sort of bind, Schmidt strongly recommends an online search to see if the business you have taken your vehicle to is accredited by the Better Business Bureau. Maga Motors — which opened in the summer of 2022 and lasted 18 months — wasn’t. Schmidt had never heard of them when DNN interviewed her on Monday.

Schmidt also recommends finding accredited businesses and calling them to find out what they would charge for the same car conundrum.

“She relied on them and their expertise, but when you’re going to make a big investment like that, perhaps it’s an opportunity to get two or three different opinions on what the fee would have been,” Schmidt said. “So many of us are friendly competitors. We appreciate good competition. You talk to any good business that does exactly what they did, they don’t like guys like (Maga Motors) in the marketplace, right? They have no problem competing with a reputable business day in and day out.”

Schmidt said business people she knows in South Dakota are not unreasonable, and Gallway fell into a nasty situation with what appears to be someone who would not hold up their end of the bargain. That Gallway was taken advantage of in a dire, unexpected situation with a tight timeline and tight budget.

“Anything that gets us off our game makes us vulnerable,” Schmidt said. “That’s one of the things we can leave this with. When you’re in an anxious situation, it’s not always your best decision making.”

Gallway said if she could do things differently, if she knew then what she knows now, she would have just had her car towed to Seattle to have it looked at there. There is a device in that Impala that allowed her to tow the car for free to Maga Motors, and would’ve allowed that free towing all the way to Seattle.

But, Schmidt and Gallway both said hindsight is 20/20.

So, now what?

Gallway said she wants to find other people who were doing business with Maga Motors, and is gathering information. Meanwhile, she’s in no rush to pay the $1,000 and climbing fees to Redi Towing.

“If they want to sit there say it’s accruing money every day, cool. You can’t make a turnip bleed,” Gallway said. “Good luck with that. You can charge me three million dollars. It doesn’t matter at the end of the day. If I don’t have it, I don’t have it. What they’re doing is ethically wrong. They’re taking advantage of a domestic violence victim that was traveling across the country to escape abuse and holding my car hostage for money I don’t have for over a situation that wasn’t my fault.

“Telling me that it was abandoned on private property while I was paying to have work done on it? Like, how do you sleep at night telling somebody that?”

She understands the cost of towing it there.

“I’ll give you the two or three hundred dollars to tow it there, cool,” Gallway said. “What is the other 700 dollars for, other than to pad your wallet? What are you charging me for? What are you punishing me for?”

Again, Redi Towing declined both an interview or making a remark for a story. Dakota News Now has tried reaching out to the owners of Maga Motors, who have not responded. The company’s listed phone line is disconnected. A google search shows that the business is “permanently closed.”

Now settled in Seattle, away from the alleged domestic violence afflicted on her by her ex-husband, Gallway is still trying to get to the bottom of all this and make sense of it.

“I’m waiting on Ashton Kutcher to jump out and say, ‘You’re Punked,” Gallway said.

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