Two Columbia College janitors, Mario Torres and Lester Wilson, are suing pro-Hamas protestors and people who funded them for battery, assault, and conspiracy to violate their civil rights, stemming from an incident in 2024 when protestors stormed and took over Hamilton Hall on the College’s campus.
The 2 males say they’ve struggled with the aftermath of the violence and, in line with the lawsuit, they’ve suffered bodily accidents and post-traumatic stress dysfunction.
Neither Torres nor Wilson have been in a position to return to work.
The suit, filed on April 25, lists James Carlson, Aidan Parisi, Grant Miner, Catherine Curran-Groome, Folks’s Discussion board, Inc., Lisa Fithian, Gabriel Yancy, Ethan Choi and John Does as defendents.
The lawsuit was filed in federal court docket on Friday night by Torridon Regulation and the Louis D. Brandeis Middle for Human Rights Below Regulation on behalf of Columbia janitors Mario Torres and Lester Wilson. It alleges that over 40 Columbia college students and “outdoors agitators,” some however not all of whom had been arrested by police following the takeover of Columbia’s Hamilton Corridor final April 29, “terrorized” each Torres and Wilson “into the early morning of April thirtieth, assaulted and battered them, held them towards their will, and derided them as ‘Jew-lovers’ and ‘Zionists.’ ”
******
“Mario and Lester are first rate, trustworthy, hardworking males who’ve been by way of hell. None of this ever ought to have occurred,” mentioned Tara Helfman, one of many Torridon legal professionals on the case.
The lawsuit describes the protesters, nearly all of whom “donned masks and hoods to hide their identities,” as “harking back to the Ku Klux Klan.” It claims they “are a part of a broad pro-Hamas, anti-Semitic community of organizations, teams, and cells which might be related by way of a largely untraceable underground communications system. They promote and resort to violent and unlawful techniques, and are motivated by invidious discrimination towards Jews and supporters of Jews.”
As The Gateway Pundit reported,Torres was photographed slamming 40-year-old trust fund kid James Carlson towards the wall in Hamilton Corridor whereas rabid leftists stormed and trashed the constructing.
Torres later instructed reporter Francesca Block that the protesters were organized and their occupation of the constructing was deliberate.
The janitors, who had been trapped within the constructing whereas beneath siege by radicals, shared that they had been gripped with “sheer terror,” and the violent mob was armed with zip ties and chains and carrying hand-drawn flooring plans and provide lists.
NEW: Columbia janitors reveal chilling particulars of the Anti-Israel protest takeover of Hamilton Corridor.
In line with head custodian Henry Clemente, the rioters stormed in with hand-drawn flooring plans and had been ready for a protracted occupation.
“They mapped every part out. They… pic.twitter.com/nYuKVsdBJ3
— Hank™ (@HANKonX) May 11, 2024
Henry Clemente, a head custodian for Columbia, instructed The New York Submit, “You probably have masked folks working by way of the constructing with zip ties and chains, you don’t know what they’re going to do — in the event that they’re going to take you hostage, when you’re going to be tortured, when you’re going to be made an instance.
Whereas Clemente and his crew had been cleansing up the wreckage, they found handwritten secret plans that confirmed the takeover was something however spontaneous. It was properly deliberate.
Within the days after masked protestors at Columbia stormed Hamilton Corridor and trapped three janitors within the constructing, one of many janitors instructed me he thought: “I may have been killed in there.”
Now he’s suing the individuals who held him hostage — and people he says funded them. https://t.co/N6OUPkkBmC
— Frannie Block (@FrannieBlock) April 27, 2025
