Kori St. Martin and her fiance used to work on the sales floor of the Bayside Mitsubishi dealership in La Porte, Texas. When a new Outlander caught her eye, she approached her manager about trading in her old car. She still had a loan on her old car, but her manager said the dealership would pay it off as part of the trade-in.

St. Martin pulled the trigger and made the deal. A few months later, she gets a call from the bank that issued her original loan. They asked why she was late on her car payments, and when they could expect to be paid.

“I’m like, ‘What do you mean? My payment’s late? I traded that vehicle in,'” she told Click 2 Houston. “That’s about whenever I found out what’s going on.”

Being an employee at the dealership, she walked up to the manager who helped her make the deal to tell her she was called by the bank about late payment.

“I went to one of my managers. At first, I kind of was told, ‘You know, it’ll be taken care of,'” she said. To her dismay, it never was. Now that the dealership is out of business, there’s no promise as to when, or if, her original loan will ever be paid off. Now she’s stuck paying off two auto loans: one for the vehicle she traded in, and one for her new Outlander.

St. Martin isn’t the only one paying two loans

Once the dealership went belly up, several former employees said the same thing happened to them. A few of St. Martin’s customers have come forward with the same claim. St. Martin said managers pressured her into making the same deals with customers.

“They were basically telling all these customers, telling us to tell all these customers, ‘Hey, y’all, we’re going to give you this for your trade. We’ll pay it off. Don’t worry about it. You’ll be OK.’ And then here they are. Not doing any of that,” St. Martin said.

“Knowing how I feel and then knowing that I’m part of the reason why that happened, not that it was in my control, but that it happened. It really, like, it sucks.”

St. Martin is now paying thousands per month towards two car loans, including her rent.

“I’m paying on the closer end of $1,500 a month,” she said. “My rent’s not even $1,500 a month.”

The dealership owner is nowhere to be found

Click 2 Houston reporters discovered the dealership is being sued for millions of dollars due to other financial mishaps. Kenny O’Kane, a former manager of the dealership, said the owner has good intentions but is stuck behind an 8-ball.

“That’s a legal obligation that the owner needs to take care of and he’s going to take care of it,” he said, referring to paying off the original trade-in loans of customers and employees. “He’s in the process of trying to sell the property and he will take care of that. He’s got to take care of that. I think it will happen otherwise I probably wouldn’t be here. And I believe in the owner that he wants to take care of it, wants to do the right thing.”

Reporters contacted the dealership’s former owner for answers but never heard back.