An anti-Israel protestor busted during the Columbia University and City College campus unrest once declared that the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack was one of the “greatest days of my life,” police sources told The Post — as details on other arrestees’ violent pasts continued to emerge Thursday.
Rudy Ralph Martinez, 32, was among the 282 protesters and agitators who were cuffed and hauled away when the NYPD encountered unruly mobs during a crackdown on tent encampments at both schools late Tuesday.
Martinez, who was nabbed at CUNY’s Harlem campus on a burglary charge, is a serial protester on the anti-Israel front, according to law enforcement sources.
He was captured on camera praising Hamas during a New York City protest in December, video circulating on social media shows.
“One of the greatest days of my life,” a smirking Martinez said as he described the deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
“Long live the resistance,” he added, according to the clip.
Martinez, who cops believe may be currently employed at CUNY after recently graduating from there, has an “extensive history” of protest-related arrests to his name that date back to California in 2012, sources said.
In the Big Apple alone, Martinez’s rap sheet includes a slew of arrests for disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, obstruction and refusal to disperse, according to the sources.
He wasn’t the only serial protester.
One of the agitators busted inside Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall has a lengthy track record of protest-related violence — including an incident that allegedly left a cop severely injured nearly a decade ago.
Antisemitism controversy at Columbia University: Key events
- More than 280 anti-Israel demonstrators were cuffed at Columbia and the City of New York campuses overnight in a “massive” NYPD operation.
- One hundred and nine people were nabbed at the Ivy League campus after cops responded to Columbia’s request to help oust a destructive mob that had illegally taken over the Hamilton Hall academic building late Tuesday, NYC Mayor Eric Adams and police said.
- Hizzoner blamed the on-campus chaos on insurgents who have a “history of escalating situations and trying to create chaos” instead of protesting peacefully.
- Columbia’s embattled president Minouche Shafik, who has faced mounting calls to resign for not cracking down sooner, issued a statement Wednesday saying the on-campus violence had “pushed the university to the brink.”
- Columbia University president Minouche Shafik was accused of “gross negligence” while testifying before Congress. Shafik refused to say if the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is antisemitic.
- More than 100 Columbia professors signed a letter defending students who support the “military action” by Hamas.
James Carlson, 40, who was cuffed at the Ivy League campus on a burglary charge, is a “long-time figure in the anarchist world” and antigovernmental “extremist circles,” sources said.
He was slapped with a string of charges, including suspicion of attempted lynching and aggravated assault on a police officer, over a violent political protest in San Francisco in 2005 that left a cop with a serious head injury, NYPD sources said.
In that incident, Carlson was accused of trying to set a patrol car on fire before he and others allegedly set upon the officer. The outcome of the charges in that case wasn’t immediately known.
More recently, Carlson — who also goes by the alias Cody — was charged with burning a Jewish protester’s Israeli flag outside Columbia University on April 21, prosecutors said.
During that ordeal, cops said a perp took the 22-year-old victim’s flag, another tossed a rock at the victim and a third aggressor lit the flag on fire.
Police charged Carlson on Wednesday with criminal mischief, criminal possession of stolen property and arson stemming from that incident. Cops are still hunting the two other suspects.
Carlson was released on his own recognizance at his Manhattan Criminal Court arraignment Thursday and is due back before a judge on June 20.
He was also involved in protests in January that blocked off entrances to the Holland Tunnel and the Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges, sources said.
Another demonstrator arrested at CUNY, Jacob Isaac Gabriel, 27, also has a slew of protest-related arrests to his name.
Gabriel often shows up to Big Apple protests clad in Black Bloc gear — a tactic used to by protesters to shield their identity with ski masks or helmets, police sources said.
He was also allegedly among the hundreds of pro-Palestine protesters who stormed the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, the sources said.
His rap sheet includes recent charges of resisting arrest, disorderly conduct, refusal to move, offenses against public administrators, fighting and trespassing, according to sources.
The new details emerged as police sources revealed more than 40% of the protesters arrested during the on-campus unrest weren’t actually students — a day after Mayor Eric Adams warned that “outside agitators” were radicalizing youngsters.
Of the 282 protesters hauled away during the massive NYPD operation, 134 of them had zero affiliation with either school, according to NYPD sources.
“A preliminary review of the numbers, just the beginning process of analyzing, but it appears, though, that over 40% of those who participated in Columbia and CUNY were not from the school and they were outsiders,” Adams told NPR of the numbers.