Man convicted of shooting Palestinian students

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 defence 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 paralysed 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.

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 US 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 neighbours. 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, which is in 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 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 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, defence 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.