Casey Goonan pleads guilty to firebombing incidents linked to protests at UC Berkeley, facing significant prison time.

Berkeley: So, there’s this guy named Casey Robert Goonan, right? He’s 34 and has been in some serious trouble for firebombing a police car at UC Berkeley. This all went down last summer when he was protesting how the university treated pro-Palestinian activists.
He just pleaded guilty to federal arson charges for a bunch of incidents that happened in June 2024. One of those was the firebombing of a UC police car, and he even admitted to it in court. Goonan, who calls himself a “scholar-activist,” was caught after he posted some pretty wild stuff online about the attacks.
At the time of his arrest, he was living with his parents in Pleasant Hill. He confessed to putting a bag with six Molotov cocktails under a police car and lighting it on fire. A campus camera even caught the whole thing on tape!
But that’s not all. He also tried to throw Molotov cocktails at a federal building in Oakland and set smaller fires on campus. Goonan has a PhD in African American Studies and has written about radical movements, which makes this whole situation even more intense.
He had some pretty extreme views, too. In anonymous posts, he talked about burning down buildings at UC Berkeley and made some heavy statements about the treatment of Palestinian people. It’s clear he was really passionate, but he took it way too far.
Before all this, he was arrested at a protest in San Francisco last year. Now, he’s facing a minimum of five years in prison for his actions. The U.S. Attorney made it clear that while everyone has the right to express their views, violence is not the way to do it.
Goonan’s sentencing is set for April 8, 2025, and it’ll be interesting to see how this all plays out.