‘Loot shops, shoot cops, steal crops’: Leftwing domestic terrorist gets 19 years 

A federal judge has sentenced a leftwing radical to 19 years in prison for a string of firebombings in June 2024 targeting law enforcement and other government buildings. 

Prosecutors describe the culprit as a “domestic terrorist” whose crimes were motivated by violent ideology, with explicit inspiration from Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, assault on Israel. 

According to the Department of Justice (DOJ), Casey Robert Goonan, 35, pleaded guilty earlier this year to one count of damaging property by fire or explosive. 

The conviction, with terrorism escalators, carried a statutory maximum of 20 years. 

Goonan’s prison sentence includes requiring him to go into drug rehabilitation and stay contained in a communications unit preventing contact with outside groups such as terror cells. 

Once out of prison, Goonan will be subject to 15 years of supervised release. 

He was also ordered to pay restitution of $94,267.51 for damages.  

Prosecutors say Goonan “has refused to show any remorse, and in fact has taken substantial steps to continue to publicize his actions and recruit others to his cause.” 

“Now, our country stands at the edge of a dangerous precipice as a growing segment of our society appears to reject these [peaceful] traditions, believing that violence is a legitimate means of protest,” Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg said in a statement. “This sentence is a sharp rebuke of that disastrous view. Now, more than ever, we must unite in condemning political violence in all its forms.” 

The timeline of Goonan’s attacks shows premeditation and escalation. 

On June 1, 2024, he ignited six Molotov cocktails beneath a marked UC Police Department vehicle parked at the Berkeley campus. 

He later returned to photograph the damage and posted an anonymous online manifesto claiming responsibility. The online screed declared, “Death to amerikkka/Glory to the martyrs,” according to the DOJ. 

Ten days later, he attempted to hurl Molotov cocktails into the Oakland Federal Building. 

Confronted by security officers, Goonan fled but ignited one of the devices in a planter outside, causing thousands of dollars in damage. 

Days later, he lit fires near Koshland Hall and a construction site at UC Berkeley, issuing manifestos calling his campaign “Operation Campus Flood” in tribute to Hamas. 

“UCLA Students Were Attacked Last Night So We Retaliated With a Firebomb on UCB Campus,” Goonan wrote online after the attack, according to the government memorandum. 

Agents recovered maps, planning documents and a self-authored pamphlet urging others to burn government and university infrastructure along with detailed instructions for avoiding detection. 

His possessions included Hamas propaganda material from the Oct. 7, 2023, attack. 

Writing from jail, Goonan referred to himself as a “revolutionary abolitionist” who supported “militant opposition” to the U.S. government. 

“Loot shops, shoot cops, steal crops,” was his manifesto’s motto, said the sentencing document. 

He mocked pacifists and praised Hamas’s tactics, arguing U.S. activists should learn from the terror group by using decoys and dismantling surveillance. 

“The defendant is a highly educated, unrepentant domestic terrorist who sought to use violence against law enforcement officers and the federal government,” prosecutors said. 

Goonan has a longtime radical background that intersects with radical academia. In 2014, he presented a paper titled “Discipline and Punishment on the Settlement-Plantation” at the 38th Annual National Council for Black Studies Conference in 2014. 

The paper was developed during his doctoral studies at UC Riverside. 

The radical neo-Marxist paper calls the U.S. a “prison” known as “the settlement-plantation” where settler colonialism is “historically, materially, and culturally linked to the conquest and continual occupation of Native land.” 

“Conceptualizing the prison through this spatial analytic allows for a dynamic and multi-scalar abolitionist praxis, revealing a number of possibilities for alliance and understandings of our own complicity within settler colonialism,” said Goonan’s abstract for the paper. 

The 19-year sentence marks one of the stiffest recent terrorism-related punishments for a domestic case tied to leftwing extremism. 

Prosecutors argued the long sentence was justified not only by the property destruction Goonan caused but also by the ideological threat he posed, his ties to Hamas propaganda and his open calls for others to emulate his methods. 

“Freedom of expression and peaceful protest are deeply enshrined values in America. We are all free to think what we want and express those views peacefully, but the use of violence to achieve political aims – or to silence those with whom you may disagree – has no place in our community and our country,” said U.S. Attorney Craig H. Missakian for the Northern District of California. “Anyone who crosses the line between peaceful protest and violence will be met with the full force of the law.”