By Michael R. Sisak and Amanda Swinhart
A jury on Monday convicted a Vermont man of attempted murder in the shootings of three Palestinian college students who were walking near his home, rejecting an insanity defense rooted in his claims that he was acting on orders from the CIA and Mossad.
Jason Eaton, 51, faces up to life in prison in the November 2023 attack near the University of Vermont campus in Burlington, which left Hisham Awartani paralyzed from the waist down and his friends, Tahseen Aliahmad and Kinnan Abdalhamid, wounded.
The jury deliberated for several hours before reaching its verdict after a weeklong trial that saw testimony from the three wounded men and psychiatric experts called by the defense and prosecution.
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Eaton was ordered jailed pending sentencing, which has yet to be scheduled. He stared ahead blankly as the verdict was read. Awartani and Aliahmad, sitting in the front row of the courtroom gallery, smiled and hugged people around them.
Eaton had pleaded not guilty but did not dispute that he was the shooter. His lawyers argued that he should be found not guilty by reason of insanity, pointing to his claims that the U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies transmitted orders to shoot the men to him via FM radio and that God was commanding him to protect his Jewish neighbors.
Had he been found not guilty by reason of insanity, he could have been ordered to undergo mental health treatment.
The shooting, a few days after Thanksgiving, shook Burlington, Vermont, and reverberated in the West Bank, where the three wounded men grew up and became friends as schoolmates in Ramallah before moving to the U.S. for college.
The November 2023 shooting, weeks after the start of the Israel-Hamas war, spawned calls for a hate crime investigation.
But no hate crime charges were filed as questions persisted about whether anti-Palestinian animus, an altered mental state or something else had compelled Eaton to open fire on Awartani, Aliahmad and Abdalhamid, who were all 20 at the time.
Eaton’s lawyers argued he was suffering from a delusional, psychotic disorder after losing his job at a credit union two weeks before the shooting.
While listening to a local NPR affiliate, Eaton believed he was hearing messages he attributed to the CIA, defense lawyer Joshua O’Hara said. At first, the messages were encouraging and validating, the lawyer said, but subsequent messages turned dark, insisting that Eaton “has to go out and shoot somebody.”
Authorities found three shotguns in Eaton’s apartment and a Ruger .380-caliber handgun that crime lab testing concluded was the gun used in the shooting, prosecutor Sally Adams said. Eaton had purchased the gun seven months earlier from a Vermont gun store.
Awartani, Aliahmad and Abdalhamid, all of whom are now 23, told jurors of their holiday weekend visit to Awartani’s grandmother’s house, a trip to a bowling alley to celebrate his twin cousins’ birthday, and the walk they took near the University of Vermont campus after dusk that ended in bloodshed.
Awartani, who was studying at Brown University in Rhode Island at the time, said they were smoking cigarettes and speaking a mix of English and Arabic. Two of them said they were wearing traditional Palestinian scarves known as keffiyehs. Awartani said he first noticed Eaton standing on a porch as they approached the apartment house where he lived.
Within seconds, Awartani said, Eaton was off the porch and walking toward them. His face was expressionless and he didn’t say anything. As Eaton got to about five to 10 feet (1.5 to 3 meters) away, “he pulled out a handgun and started shooting at us,” said Awartani, who was paralyzed from the waist down in the shooting and now uses a wheelchair.
Jacob Pyne, who lived in a different apartment in the same house as Eaton, testified that he heard four to six gunshots, followed by footsteps going up the stairs of the apartment house. He said he ran outside and heard two men speaking, one of whom was more vocal and yelling, “I’ve been shot, help me.” He then brought the men blankets and called 911.
Abdalhamid, a student at Haverford College near Philadelphia, said he fled and hid behind another home after seeing Aliahmad fall to the ground. He said he only realized later when he sat down that he had also been wounded. Awartani was shot in the chest and the bullet ricocheted off his scapula, causing paraplegia in his spinal cord. Aliahmad, who was a student at Trinity College in Connecticut, was struck in the collarbone, and Abdalhamid was shot in the right buttock.
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