STORY: "The NYPD precision policing ensured that the operation was organized, calm, and that there were no injuries or violent clashes."

That was New York City Mayor Eric Adams speaking at a news conference on May 1, a day after NYPD officers arrested pro-Palestinian student protesters occupying a Columbia University building.

But medical records, photographs and interviews with protesters tell a different story.

At least nine of the 46 protesters arrested that night inside the barricaded Hamilton Hall on April 30 sustained injuries beyond minor scrapes and bruises.

Christopher Holmes, a graduate student at the Columbia affiliate college Union Theological Seminary, says he was one of those injured that evening by an officer:

"They shoved me to the ground, and as I looked up to see what was going on around me, he [referring to a NYPD officer] kicked me square in the eye and it was... it felt like falling really hard onto cement, [FLASH] That resulted in a pretty severe concussion and a fracture of my orbital bone, which thankfully doesn't require surgery."

Documented injuries from that night included a fractured eye socket, concussions, an ankle sprain, cuts, and injured wrists and hands from tight plastic flexicuffs.

The arrests came after Columbia President Minouche Shafik called in police hours into the occupation at the campus... which has become an epicenter of a student protest movement that has spread to campuses around the world.

Reuters shared details of the protesters' injuries and accounts with the mayor's office, New York police and Columbia.

None disputed the injuries.

"I was pushed down and knocked down along with the barricades when the police first breached."

Gabriel Yancy, a research assistant who has since been fired from his job in a Columbia neuroscience laboratory, described what he saw and experienced that night:

"I saw the police pushed people to the ground against the marble stairs. I saw them push, or hold them down, with, using their body weight, using their knees, stepping on them. I saw people kicked."

A spokesperson for the mayor declined to say when the mayor first learned that protesters had been injured.

While a police spokesperson wrote in an email to Reuters that officers responded "swiftly, professionally, and effectively."