Jason Bitton was arrested after injuring three people with a car near the Google headquarters in New York City (Pictures: FNTV)
Three people were injured, including a 12-year-old child, after a man who claims Google is ‘torturing’ him crashed a car into the side of a building near the search engine’s headquarters in New York City.
Around 6.00pm on Tuesday, a man drove a Ford Fusion sedan onto the sidewalk near West 15th Street and 10th Avenue in Chelsea, the New York Police Department (NYPD) said.
The driver then slammed into a building, shattering a glass doorway and hitting three people in the process.
The victims were identified as two adult women ages 50 and 47, as well as a 12-year-old girl. They were hospitalized at Lenox Health in Greenwich Village in stable condition.
The car slammed into a building close to Google’s Manhattan headquarters (Picture: FNTV)
Photos from the scene show a strange assortment of items thrown from the vehicle, including pill bottles, a red gas canister, and a homemade protest sign reading ‘Google Tortured Me!’
It is unclear if there was any gas inside the canister.
The glass building was about one block away from Google’s Manhattan headquarters, located at 111 8th Avenue.
The suspect was identified as Jason Bitton, a 34-year-old resident of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. He was arrested and charged with assault and attempted assault.
An assortment of items found at the crime scene (Picture: FNTV)
Posts on social media show that Bitton was a longtime critic of Google,
In one 2021 post on Facebook, Bitton wrote: ‘I guess Google thinks it’s ok to torture someone across their entire Android O.S ecosystem system, no security updates for almost 4 years.’
He also accused the search engine of ‘practicing news censorship.’
Bitton had previously filed a lawsuit against the search engine giant in 2019, alleging the company used blinding lights for a ‘social control program’ against him.
The suspect had long complained that Google was ‘torturing’ him on social media (Picture: FNTV)
In the complaint, Bitton claimed that he was previously diagnosed with ‘extreme photophobia,’ or an intolerance to light. The suit was thrown out by a district judge in Brooklyn.
This is not the first incidence of violence at the Google building this year.
In February and May, two Google employees have leaped to their deaths from the company’s 15-story building.
The company has not commented on either death.
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The victims were identified as two adult women ages 50 and 47, as well as a 12-year-old girl.