Family of Teen Punched by Fairfield Officer Files Claim With Bay Area Civil Rights Attorneys

“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.