KQED61%
Family of Teen Punched by Fairfield Officer Files Claim With Bay Area Civil Rights Attorneys 49%
By Katie DeBenedetti69%
6/1/2026, 4:19:23 PM
Topics: Criminal Justice, Education
BS Summary: This article contains 26 faulty reasoning types, including Availability Heuristic, Framing Effect, and Appeal to Emotion, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 48.7% saturation with 369 hits. Analysis detected 1,923 faulty-reasoning hits from 757 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 49.5% and a BS Rank of 49% (11,287 of 21,887 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 51.60% of the article peer group.
Attorneys from a prominent Bay Area civil rights law firm said they plan to file a lawsuit on behalf of the 16-year-old who was repeatedly punched in the head by a police officer after an altercation at Fairfield High School last month.
Long-time police watchdog John Burris said Monday his firm had filed a government claim against the city of Fairfield, the first step in initiating a lawsuit.
The legal action comes after viral video footage showed Fairfield Police Officer Bianca Camacho, who also goes by the name Bianca Brown, repeatedly striking 16-year-old Maurice Williams in the head after he’s been brought to the ground and is covering his face with his hands.
“This is an officer who should be terminated,” Ben Nisenbaum, another of the attorneys representing Williams, said at the firm’s Oakland headquarters.
“If there is a criminal investigation, it should be into her and that she should be charged.”
Williams was arrested amidst a physical altercation involving multiple students on May 20, according to Fairfield Police.
Williams’ attorneys said he had been in a verbal argument with another student, and that it “never escalated into a physical altercation.”
In video footage captured by Williams’ stepmother, Camacho tells Williams’ family that he was arrested for resisting and injuring a staff member at the school.
She tells the family: “I punched him in the face.
Yes, I did.”
“I used the necessary force to overcome his resistance to affect my arrest,” Camacho continued.
Fairfield Police released body-worn camera footage last month that shows Williams evading officers’ attempts to restrain him, at one point running into a crowd of other students in an outdoor hallway of the high school.
Williams was restrained by a school resource officer, James Lewis, before Camacho approached.
In video footage, she appears to throw the boy to the ground before punching him repeatedly in the side of the head, pulling his hair and handcuffing him.
“Give me your f— hands,” she yells multiple times.
The Fairfield Police Department said the hits were “distraction strikes.”
“You can call a punch a distraction strike.
I guess you can call a gunshot fire a warning shot, but this distraction strike struck [Williams] in the head,” Nisenbaum said.
“This use of force is the kind of thing that causes people to lose faith in the police that they see around them, and that is a damage especially to the person on whom it’s inflicted, a young man who doesn’t have a criminal history.”
Williams, who is a football player, said since the incident, he’s been worried about being recognized or harassed by police.
“I’m barely even able to go outside the house now,” he said at the press conference on Monday.
He has not been back to school, his family said.
“There’s a lot of concern about his mental health.
There’s a lot of concern about his growth.
There’s a lot of concern about his future,” Williams’ uncle, Rhamell Stevenson, said.
Williams’ attorneys said he sustained a concussion and had been suffering from headaches and dizzy spells since the incident.
Last week, a video showing Camacho pulling a teenager from a car in July 2025 compounded excessive force allegations against the officer.
In the video, posted by Bay City News, Myah Hamilton, then 18, is dragged from the vehicle by her hair after a traffic stop.
“Please don’t rip me out.
Can you stop, please?”
Hamilton said in the video, filmed by someone sitting in the passenger seat.
She was charged with reckless driving and resisting arrest.
It’s not clear why Hamilton was asked to get out of her vehicle, or how many times Camacho asked her to get out of the vehicle prior to using force.
Fairfield Police said that Camacho was administratively reassigned following the May 20 incident.
The department declined to comment on Monday.
Ilana Israel Samuels, Fairfield-Suisun Unified School District’s executive director of communications, said the district does not comment on active legal matters, but “recognizes the concerns and emotions being shared regarding the recent arrest of a student” on campus.
Williams’ family said they hope the officer is fired and faces criminal charges.
“I hope that at the least, that officer is gone, fired, but also that it prompts a conversation, a restorative conversation between Fairfield School District, the police department and the community to attempt to restore some type of cohesion, because our kids deserve that,” Stevenson said.
KQED’s Sara Hossaini contributed to this report.
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100%flagged-word coverageIlana Israel Samuels
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