Assemi lawsuit and Fresno area schools race to meet mascot deadline

A former Granville Homes chief financial officer has put Darius Assemi back in the legal spotlight, accusing him in Fresno County Superior Court of diverting company funds to secretly buy back a ranch his family had lost to creditors. Ryan Toncheff’s June 2026 whistleblower lawsuit says the alleged diversion could reach as much as $16 million, raising new questions about how money moved through one of Fresno’s best-known real estate businesses.

The complaint also says Assemi tried to skirt court supervision while steering corporate cash into the ranch deal. The case adds another layer to the long-running scrutiny around the Assemi family and Granville Homes, with the allegations now centered on whether company funds were used for a private recovery of family property.

At the same time, Fresno-area schools were racing to meet a different deadline with immediate local consequences: California’s racial mascot law took effect July 1, 2026. Assembly Bill 3074 bars public schools from using derogatory Native American terms for school or athletic team names, mascots or nicknames, unless a district receives written consent from a local federally recognized tribe.

Fresno Unified moved ahead of the cutoff by changing mascots at Tenaya Middle School, Tioga Middle School and Lowell Elementary School. The new names are Titans, Hawks and Lions. The district was among the last in the region to finish revisions before the deadline, a process that forced schools to decide quickly which names would stay and which would go.

The law also left one narrow path for schools that wanted to keep a Native-themed mascot. Clark Intermediate in Clovis kept the Chieftain mascot after receiving a consent letter from the North Fork Rancheria of Mono Indians. That exception showed how the statute could preserve a name only when a local tribe signed off in writing.

Together, the two developments have put Fresno County on notice in very different ways. In one case, a private company is fighting over millions of dollars and alleged misuse of corporate cash. In the other, public schools are redrawing their identities by the state deadline, with local tribes holding the key to whether some old names can survive.