Man Hits 3 People After Crashing Car into Building Near Google's NYC Office

(Photo : Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Former Uber driver Jason Bitton claims Google was ‘torturing’ him.

A 34-year-old man claiming to be a critic of Google crashed a car into a building near the company's New York City headquarters Tuesday evening (June 20), injuring three pedestrians.

Police said the man, identified as local man Jason Bitton, drove onto the sidewalk and crashed his white Ford Fusion into a building on West 15th Street and 10th Avenue in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood.

A 12-year-old girl and two women aged 50 and 47 were hit by the car. All of them were taken to hospital in a stable condition.

Police said Bitton was arrested on assault charges and had not yet been arraigned as of Wednesday (June 21). It was also unclear if he has been represented in court.

Self-Proclaimed Google Critic

Images posted on social media show a homemade sign saying "Google Tortured Me!" and what appeared to be a gasoline can at the crash scene, about a block near Google's 15-story New York headquarters.

Bitton previously worked as an Uber driver and filed a lawsuit in New York state court in Brooklyn in 2019, accusing Google of using blinding lights to operate a "social control program."

In a 2021 Facebook post, he also claimed that Google's Android operating system was flashing users in the eyes "for purposes of maliciously injury." Another post that year said Google thought they could "torture someone across their entire Android OS ecosystem" as there were "no security updates for almost 4 years."