‘Met with Aggression’: Black Student Went to School for a Crisis Counseling Session. California Cop Slammed Him to the Ground, Accused Him of Trespassing.
Justin Richardson was a 17-year-old high school student when the Black teen was brutally assaulted by a school resource officer in California last year who accused him of trespassing, slamming him to the ground, and injuring him, according to a lawsuit filed last week.
But Richardson, who was attending a weekly therapy session at Berkeley High School, was authorized to be on campus that day, March 4, 2025.
Lino Guananja, the Berkeley Unified school resource officer who confronted him, is accused of forcing the teen to a side exit where he knew he would not be recorded and continuing to abuse him, the complaint states.
Guananja then called for backup, prompting several more Berkeley police officers to join the assault, according to witnesses, including a teacher who had attended the required therapy session.
“This was a student in emotional crisis looking for help,” teacher Amanda Cardno wrote in a statement to the Berkeley school board at a meeting last year, days after the incident.
“They were met with aggression and a lack of de-escalation tactics.”
Initial reports said Richardson was arrested on suspicion of threatening a school safety officer, refusing to leave the Berkeley High campus, and being intoxicated, according to The Berkeley Scanner.
But court records do not indicate that Richardson was ever charged with a crime, according to Berkeleyside.
According to the lawsuit, filed by California attorney Mainak D’Attar last month:
“On March 4, 2025, while JR was leaving his weekly therapy session on the BHS campus to return to his home campus at BTA, he was approached by a BPD school resource officer (the ‘SRO’), who assaulted JR without provocation, slammed him and injured him, then led him off campus to a side exit where the SRO knew cameras could not record the encounter, further assaulted JR, and falsely arrested him.”
Walkout in Protest
On the day of the assault, Richardson, who attended Berkeley Technology Academy, was on the Berkeley High School campus for a weekly therapy session that was part of his Individualized Education Program, a plan designed to help students with disabilities succeed academically and socially.
Berkeley Technology Academy is an alternative high school within the Berkeley Unified School District designed to help students who are behind in credits or need a more personalized approach to learning.
The school enrolls fewer than 50 students, more than half of them Black. Berkeley High School, meanwhile, enrolls more than 3,200 students, and less than 12 percent are Black.
“BHS often treats our BTA students as trespassers,” Cardno said in her statement to the school board.
Richardson’s arrest prompted protests from Berkeley High’s Black Student Union, which walked out of class and demanded the removal of Guananja as the district’s only school resource officer.
The school’s Black Student Union, founded in 1968 following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., posted the following statement on its Instagram page last year, pointing to two separate cases of abuse by the same officer:
In the past 2 weeks, 2 children have been unnecessarily arrested without notice on campus. The School Resource Officer (SRO) has been overstepping his jurisdiction as an SRO when making these arrests, and has even used violent language and excessive force when detaining these students.
This officer has created an unsafe environment for Black and Brown students at BHS, is actively using our hallways as his personal playground to abuse his power, pulling students out of class during school time, as well as escalating situations to dangerous extremes. He embodies, and is actively contributing to, the school-to-prison pipeline, and these recent incidents have proved that.
We, as the Black Student Union, call on all students, whether you have experienced this abuse of power or not, to speak out against this behavior. We do not want him within our school walls, or at any other schools, continuing this abuse. We will not tolerate or enable him to continue this behavior. We demand that this school resource officer be removed and fired from working within BUSD.
The incident was captured on video, but the footage has not been made public or provided to Richardson’s attorney.
An activist from Berkeley Cop Watch posted a video of Guananja and another cop three months later, accusing them of interfering with his right to record police in public.
History of Intimidation and Profiling
Guananja, who has served as school resource officer since September 2024, has also been accused of intimidating students by attending a talk by historian and police abolitionist Geo Maher, who was discussing his book, A World Without Police.
Guananja’s presence at the discussion “caused immediate distress among students and staff, with some students fearing an arrest was imminent,” Berkeley High Dean of Students Cassandra Tesch told Berkeleyside.
Tesch said she asked the officer to leave, but instead he walked up to the podium to introduce himself, which she called “unprofessional and disruptive to the learning environment.”
Sophia Castillian, a former communications director of Berkeley High’s Black Student Union, accused Guananja of profiling Black students and watching them more closely in an effort to find reasons to arrest them.
“It was never a shared experience with our white counterparts; they never experienced that sort of high surveillance,” Castillian told Berkeleyside.
The lawsuit does not name Guananja individually, but it lists the Berkeley Unified School District and the Berkeley Police Department, which employ him, as defendants.
The lawsuit, which seeks at least $35,000 in damages, accuses the defendants of negligence, false imprisonment, assault, battery, child abuse, and violation of the Child Abuse and Neglect Reporting Act because the school allegedly failed to report the incident to the Department of Education as required by law.
Tesch, who does not believe SROs should be on campus at all, witnessed Richardson’s arrest by several aggressive officers and told local media that she “feared for his life.”
“That could likely have been de-escalated by a social worker or someone trained to support individuals in crisis, especially those who might be triggered by the sight of someone wearing a gun,” she said.