In December 2023, months before Columbia University student activists took over Hamilton Hall, a group of them “ran riot” through the campus building and “scrawled obscene graffiti, including swastikas,” a school janitor alleged in a federal discrimination complaint. Columbia did not investigate the ordeal because the swastikas were considered “free speech” and were “written in chalk and could be erased,” according to the janitor, Mariano Torres.
Torres filed the complaint alongside his colleague, Lester Wilson, in October. Both men were working inside Hamilton Hall on the night of April 29, 2024, when Hamas-supporting rioters stormed the building and hoisted a banner calling for “intifada.”
Those rioters had a trial run months earlier, according to Torres, who detailed in his complaint a “night in December 2023” in which “dozens of masked and unmasked demonstrators ran riot through the building shouting, ‘Free Palestine!,’ and…
