Man says CIA told him to shoot students

Jason Eaton insisted he was acting on orders from the CIA and Mossad when he shot three Palestinian college students who were walking past his home a few days after Thanksgiving.

He said the US and Israeli intelligence agencies transmitted the messages to him via FM radio and that God was commanding him to protect his Jewish neighbours. Eaton’s claims were at the heart of his insanity defence as he went on trial Monday on attempted murder charges in a case that 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 US for college.

The November 2023 shooting, which occurred 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 Hisham Awartani, Tahseen Aliahmad and Kinnan Abdalhamid, who were all 20 at the time.

The men testified one after another as Eaton, now 51, watched stoically from the defence table in a Burlington courtroom. He has pleaded not guilty but doesn’t dispute that he was the shooter. If convicted, he faces up to life in prison. If found not guilty by reason of insanity, he could be ordered to undergo mental health treatment.

Defence lawyer Joshua O’Hara, previewing testimony from a defence psychiatrist, told jurors in an opening statement that Eaton 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 that he attributed to the CIA, 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”.

Prosecutor Sally Adams told jurors that a state psychiatrist, who is slated to testify, concluded that Eaton did not have a mental disease or defect. Evidence will show he intended to kill the men, was not legally justified in shooting them, and does not meet the test of legal insanity, Adams said.