Casey Robert Goonan, 35, of Oakland, was sentenced to more than 19.5 years in federal prison on Tuesday for firebombing a University of California, Berkeley police car, a series of arson attacks on the public school’s campus and an attempted firebombing of a federal building.
Goonan, who pleaded guilty in January to vandalizing property in support of Palestinians after Oct. 7, was sentenced to 235 months, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California stated.
In June 2024, Goonan lit Molotov cocktails underneath a university police car and set fire to parts of campus three times that month, he admitted. He also admitted that he threw rocks at a federal building in Oakland that month, hoping to break windows and then throw Molotov cocktails inside. (Those efforts were thwarted.)
The department said that Goonan was inspired by the Oct. 7 attacks and that he urged people to “attack property on Bay Area college campuses in support of Palestine.” He was trying to use “intimidation and coercion” to “retaliate against the governments of the United States and the state of California for their conduct,” the federal government said.
