Columbia workers recount fearful time trapped in hall
NEW YORK
Mariano Torres, a maintenance worker at Columbia University, was cleaning on the third floor of Hamilton Hall in his signature Yankees cap one night last week, when he heard a commotion downstairs. He said he figured it had something to do with the pro-Palestinian encampment on the lawn outside and kept working.
He was shocked, he said, when he suddenly saw five or six protesters, their faces covered by scarves or masks, picking up chairs and bringing them into the stairway.
“I’m like, ‘What the hell is going on? Put it back. What are you doing?’ ” he recalled.
He said he tried to block them and they tried to reason with him to get out of the way, telling him “this is bigger than you.” One person, he recalled, told him he didn’t get paid enough to deal with this. Someone tried to offer him “a fistful of cash.”
He said he replied: “I don’t want your money, dude. Just get out of the building.”
It was the beginning of what would be a frightening time for Torres and two other maintenance workers in Hamilton Hall, who were inside when pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia took over the building.
Just as upsetting as their encounters with the protesters, the three workers recounted in interviews this week, was their feeling that the university had not done enough to prevent the attack or to help them once the building was under siege.
“I cannot believe they let this happen,” Torres said.
Only one security guard was posted at the building when the demonstrators entered, despite heightened tensions from the growing encampment nearby, witnesses said.
Torres and his colleagues called for help from the police and the school’s public safety officers, but no one arrived in time to assist them. The university eventually asked the police to clear the building and other protesters around campus, but they did not come until nearly 20 hours later.
That meant the workers, who were briefly trapped inside, had to make their own way out.
“They failed to protect us,” said Torres, 45, whose scuffle with a male protester was captured by a freelance photojournalist inside the building. The image, showing Torres pushing a man against a wall, ricocheted around social media.
The union that represents the workers, Local 241 of the Transport Workers Union, has requested more information from Columbia about what the police had told the school before the occupation.
John Samuelsen, the international president of the union, wrote Monday to Minouche Shafik, the president of Columbia, saying she had “epically failed to protect the safety of these university employees, who were forced to fight their way out of the building.”
On April 30, at about 12:30 a.m., a crowd of students had surrounded Hamilton Hall, cheering, as dozens of pro-Palestinian demonstrators entered. The building, on Columbia’s central Morningside Heights campus in upper Manhattan, has symbolic significance as a place of student protest and had been occupied five times by student protesters since 1968.
For months, pro-Palestinian students had protested to urge the university to divest from Israel, among other demands, over the country’s offensive in the Gaza
Strip, eventually setting up a tent encampment. But the takeover of Hamilton Hall was a marked escalation.
Shafik wrote in a letter to the police that before protesters entered the hall, “an individual hid in the building until after it closed and let the other individuals in.”
Torres was not surprised: He said he had caught a woman hiding under tables or behind doors “three or four times” over the last several weeks. And five days before the occupation, Lester Wilson, another longtime facilities worker in the building, had opened the door to a third floor closet just before midnight and found a surprise.
He said a woman was crouching in the slop sink, hiding and holding the door shut. Wilson said he brought her to university safety officers, and was not sure what happened next.
Both Torres and Wilson said they believed the occupiers had been highly organized, with knowledge of the location of the security cameras and exits, and backpacks full of supplies including rope, chains and zip ties.
The sole public safety officer in the lobby left when confronted by the occupiers and called for backup, several witness said. The protesters then quickly began barricading the main doors with furniture and chains. The occupiers appear to have timed their break-in with the midnight shift change, and the woman on duty was coming off her shift, the union said.
Torres, who had worked there for five years, confronted some of the protesters, trying to protect what he saw as “his building.”
But as he saw the number of protesters grow to “maybe 15 or 20,” he said, he realized he could not fight them. He asked to be let out, but someone said the doors downstairs were already barricaded and that he couldn’t leave.
Torres filed a university accident report that day showing a raw wound on his knuckles and stating he had bruises on his neck. It also stated that he had been “assaulted and battered, and wrongfully imprisoned.”
“I had no protection whatsoever from campus police or NYPD and felt abandoned by those whose duty it is to protect me,” he wrote in a document shared with The New York Times.