Seven employees at 2 Washington Square Village were suspended days after police arrested a squatter charged with assaulting an NYU student and stealing from residents, and were reportedly reinstated after nearly 200 tenants signed a petition saying they did not think downsizing security would make the complex safer.

The employees — which include doormen, security guards and the faculty housing building’s superintendent — were suspended without pay after security footage reportedly revealed that James Rizzo, who residents believed was squatting for two to three days, walked past them to enter the building. NYU spokesperson John Beckman told WSN that because the employees were contracted by a third party, the university “would not have been involved” in disciplinary decisions.

“The safety of our community members is of the utmost importance, and the university takes last week’s incident very seriously,” Beckman wrote in a statement. “The university’s Department of Campus Safety is consulting with Collins Building Services, which oversees the building employees in the Washington Square Village complex, on what steps to take to tighten security, which will likely include additional cameras, monitoring and other technology.” 

All seven were reportedly reinstated on Thursday after residents raised the issue at a Tuesday meeting addressing the incident. Tenants also spoke with Campus Safety head Fountain Walker, CBS representatives and members of NYU’s faculty housing services. 

During the meeting, Walker addressed rumors that Rizzo had been squatting in the building for two years, saying that the confusion stems from Rizzo having assaulted a woman on the complex’s driveway two years prior. Walker had also denied the claims in the universitywide email last week, noting that Rizzo was released from jail in September. 

Resident and CAS professor Rebecca Goetz, who spearheaded the petition, told WSN that employees were tasked with an “impossible” job because the building where Rizzo was found houses amenity spaces and sees more traffic than other buildings in the complex. She also said the meeting failed to address her concerns regarding a lack of communication — noting that residents weren’t informed of Rizzo’s arrest until over a day later, and didn’t learn he was the same man who assaulted an NYU student until over two days later.

“Safety is a holistic, systemic issue that isn’t going to be solved by suspending doormen,” Goetz said. “There’s plenty of blame and responsibility to go around, but targeting the community’s most vulnerable people doesn’t sit well with a lot of us.”

Four tenants who lived in burglarized apartments signed the petition along with nearly 100 residents in the building where Rizzo was found. Other signatories included employees, as well as current and former residents at the other three buildings.

Resident and CAS professor David Hogg said the choice to bolster security and increase police activity can make certain people — particularly Black and brown residents — feel less safe. He also said that NYU has sent residents surveys prompting them to show interest in increased security, but never gave them the chance to opt for decreased security. 

“The thing that upsets me more than some random person living in one of our apartments is that there were empty apartments — when we’re told consistently by NYU housing that there’s no available apartments,” Hogg said. “It’s unconscionable, in a city where rents are high and people are worried about affordability, to have empty apartments.”

Hogg also noted that he would be “perfectly happy” to live in a building with no security but requires a key to enter, which he said is the case for most New York City apartments. He said that if the building made residents scan their NYU IDs to enter, he would be concerned about data security.

Resident and CAS assistant professor Dean Chahim said the suspensions were made “arbitrarily,” because one of the targeted employees, Clyde Joseph, is typically at Chahim’s building — not the one where Rizzo was found. 

“Each building has hundreds of residents. It is simply not humanly possible to expect the doormen to know everyone in every building in which they might occasionally work,” Chahim said. “Before jumping to blaming the doormen individually, I would ask first about the role that systematic understaffing and overwork of our doormen played in making this possible.”

Rizzo was charged last week with the assault of an NYU student and pleaded not guilty on Dec. 3, before getting held without bail and ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation. His decadeslong criminal history dates back to the 1990s, when he was charged with attempted murder after beating and stabbing a man in Brooklyn. In 2018, he was arrested for a hate crime in Staten Island and in 2023, he was sentenced to two years in prison for a persistent sexual abuse charge and released in September.

Contact Leena Ahmed at [email protected].