A Pleasant Hill resident has been charged with setting fire to a UC Berkeley police vehicle, according to a federal complaint.
Investigators were able to identify Casey R. Goonan, believed to have used Molotov cocktails to torch a university police car on June 1, in part because Goonan allegedly returned to the scene to grab pictures of the damage for a blog post, according to the complaint against Goonan.
Goonan, 34, is charged with one count of using fire to damage the property of an institution receiving federal aid. Goonan’s attorney in another case, Jeff Wozniak, said his client is assembling a legal team, and “They will enter a plea of not guilty at the appropriate time.”
If convicted, Goonan could face up to 20 years in prison and $250,000 in fines.
According to the complaint, surveillance footage caught a masked person, whom federal agents believe to have been Goonan, get out of a blue Honda CR-V with no license plates near Durant Avenue and Bowditch Street just after 5 a.m., walk up to a UCPD cruiser, place a shopping bag under its gas tank and ignite the bag, with the flames growing to envelop parts of the cruiser, damaging it before UCPD officers arrived to extinguish the fire.
Authorities said the shopping bag held six Molotov cocktails, assembled with beer bottles, gasoline and paper towels for wicks.
Less than six hours later, a similar car — this one with license plates attached — showed up at the scene of the fire, with someone matching Goonan’s description getting out to take pictures, according to the complaint.
The FBI matched the car to Goonan by its plate number from a security camera image and searched the car and Goonan’s family home in Pleasant Hill, finding another bag like the one that had held the Molotov cocktails, a shirt with a mask in its pocket, discarded disposable gloves, matches, lighter fluid, lighters and a gas container, according to the complaint. DNA evidence allegedly also tied Goonan to the paper towel wicks.
A blog post describing the firebombing included three images of the burnt-out UCPD car from angles matching those from which Goonan appeared to take pictures, according to the complaint. Federal agents said it must have been either the actual arsonist or a possible second person who drove the CR-V who had written it.
The post claimed the firebombing was “in solidarity” with students at UC Santa Cruz and UCLA, as well as with Cal students “seizing the time and taking back Hines Hall,” a reference to a pro-Palestine occupation of the former Anna Head School, a university-owned building vacant since a 2022 fire. The post accused the UC system of complicity with, as the post read, a “(Z)ionest (I)srael settler colony” and of UCPD of having “attacked” students.
University police first arrested Goonan on June 17 on suspicion of four different campus arson incidents — the burnt-out car, another fire earlier on June 1 outside the East Asian Library, a third fire outside Koshland Hall on June 13 and a fourth at a construction site at the Dwinelle Annex on June 16, according to an affidavit of probable cause from university police.
A more recent arson fire on campus, on the roof of the Golden Bear Café on July 8, did not appear to be related to the June arson incidents, a UCPD spokesperson said earlier this week.
The Alameda County District Attorney’s Office initially charged Goonan on June 20 with four counts of arson, two of possession of a destructive device and one of doing so near a populated area, according to state court records. The federal complaint was filed under seal six days later, on June 26. On July 3, a state superior court judge agreed to dismiss the state-level charges against Goonan, clearing the way for the then-pending federal case to proceed. The federal complaint was unsealed Thursday.
Goonan is also facing felony charges of vandalism and harming a peace officer, among other misdemeanor allegations, in the California superior court in San Francisco, according to court records. They have been in custody ever since the initial June 20 arrest, Wozniak said.
Editors’ note: This article was updated after publication with new information from Casey R. Goonan’s attorney and to correct Goonan’s preferred pronouns.
