Vermont man convicted of attempted murder in shooting of three Palestinian students

Jason Eaton, 51, was convicted Monday of attempted murder in the November 2023 Burlington shooting that left one student paralysed. The jury rejected his insanity defence.

Vermont jury convicts man over shooting of three Palestinian students in Burlington

A jury in Burlington, Vermont, on Monday convicted Jason Eaton, 51, of attempted murder in the November 2023 shootings of three Palestinian college students walking near his home, according to apnews.com. The jury deliberated for several hours before rejecting Eaton's insanity defence, in which he claimed to have been acting on orders from the CIA and the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad.

Eaton faces up to life in prison for the attack, which left Hisham Awartani paralysed from the waist down and wounded his friends Tahseen Aliahmad and Kinnan Abdalhamid.

The attack

The three men, all aged 20 at the time, had been visiting Awartani's grandmother in Burlington for Thanksgiving on 25 November 2023. They were smoking cigarettes and speaking a mix of English and Arabic as they walked near the University of Vermont campus after dusk. Two of them were wearing keffiyehs, traditional Palestinian scarves.

Awartani testified that he first noticed Eaton standing on a porch as the group approached the apartment building where Eaton lived. Within seconds, Eaton stepped off the porch and walked towards them before opening fire.

The trial

The weeklong trial heard testimony from all three victims, who recounted how their evening walk ended in violence. Psychiatric experts for both the defence and prosecution offered contrasting assessments of Eaton's mental health and criminal culpability.

Eaton did not dispute that he was the shooter but pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. His public defenders, Margaret Jansch and Joshua O'Hara, told jurors that he had struggled with mental health issues throughout his life, including diagnoses of attention deficit disorder, post-traumatic stress, bipolar disorder, depression and borderline personality disorder. They argued that he had suffered a psychotic break after losing his job at a credit union two weeks before the shooting.

Prosecutor Sarah George, the Chittenden County state's attorney, countered that Eaton was a narcissist but not legally insane. He had a grandiose sense of self-importance and lacked empathy, George said in her closing argument, but was fully aware of the criminal nature of his conduct. She noted that he appeared nervous when police arrived at his door, repeatedly asked for a lawyer and had not claimed to have received any other instructions directing his actions.

George also told the court that Eaton had informed officers he kept a shotgun in his apartment but did not disclose he possessed other weapons. A Ruger .380-calibre handgun, found in a bedroom dresser, was identified by crime lab testing as the weapon used in the shooting.

Days after the attack, George said, Eaton had told his own lawyers that he wished Awartani's grandmother had warned him the men were going to "dress up like terrorists" and walk through his neighbourhood. "They were not the words of a man confused about who he shot or why," Awartani's mother, Elizabeth Price, told reporters after the verdict.

Verdict and reaction

Eaton stared ahead blankly as the verdict was read, standing alongside his lawyers — public defenders he had tried to fire the previous week, claiming his defence had not been "adequately presented." Judge John Pacht, who had earlier blocked Eaton's bid to represent himself mid-trial, ordered him held pending sentencing, which has not yet been scheduled.

Awartani and Aliahmad watched from the front row of the courtroom gallery, smiling and embracing those around them after the verdict was announced.

"The verdict cannot undo what happened or erase the trauma our families still carry, but it affirms something fundamental: Jason Eaton is responsible for what he did," Elizabeth Price said.

Background

The shooting took place weeks after the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war and sent shockwaves through Burlington. It also reverberated in the West Bank, where all three victims had grown up and attended school together in Ramallah before moving to the United States for university.

The attack prompted calls for a hate crime investigation, but no such charges were ever filed, as questions persisted over whether anti-Palestinian animus, a disturbed mental state, or some other factor had motivated Eaton to open fire.

After the verdict, Price said that remarks Eaton made — aired during the trial — had made clear why he targeted her son. "They were the words of a man who saw three young men speaking the language of their childhood and wearing what made them feel closer to their far away families and homes," she said, "and decided to kill them because of his own prejudices."

Source: Google News MT