A janitor at Columbia University who went viral on social media last week following his confrontation with a far-left activist slammed the school this week, saying that it failed everyone.
Mario Torres, 45, was in Hamilton Hall last week when pro-Hamas protesters stormed the building and illegally occupied it, which later led to the NYPD having to be called in to take it back.
He was photographed confronting a person purportedly named James Carlson, who is “a longtime anarchist,” a high-ranking police official reportedly told the New York Post. The Post said that Carlson owns “a $3.4 million Brooklyn townhouse, has a model babymama and a stepmom dating John Cougar Mellencamp.”
“We don’t expect to go to work and get swarmed by an angry mob with rope and duct tape and masks and gloves,” Torres told The Free Press. “They came from both sides of the staircases. They came through the elevators and they were just rushing. It was just like, they had a plan.”
“When it comes to the public safety, the workers’ safety, people don’t feel comfortable walking through a mob to punch in to get into campus. That’s crazy,” Torres said. “Is Columbia going to retaliate and find a reason to fire me? Is someone going to come after me? So I’m taking a big risk doing this, but I think that they failed. They failed us. And I think that’s the bigger story. They failed us. They should have done more to protect us, and they didn’t.”
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A GoFundMe page that was set up for Torres raised more than $35,000.
Columbia: this protester was a 40-year-old trust fund kid named James Carlson, who owns a townhouse in Brooklyn worth $3.4 million. The man who tried to hold him back was Mario Torres, 45, who has worked at Columbia—where the average janitor makes less than $19 an hour—for five… pic.twitter.com/KnCOHXsbj8
— Ari Ingel (@OGAride) May 7, 2024