Vermont man found guilty of attempted murder in 2023 shooting of 3 Palestinian students

Hisham Awartani testifies in court during Jason Eaton's attempted murder trial in Chittenden County Superior Court in Burlington, Vt., on Monday. Awartani, one of three men shot in the November 2023 incident, was paralyzed from the waist down as a result of his injuries. (Glenn Russell/VTDigger/The Associated Press)Social SharingA 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 U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies.

Jason Eaton faces up to life in prison in the November 2023 attack in Burlington, which paralyzed Hisham Awartani from the waist down and wounded his friends, Tahseen Aliahmad and Kinnan Abdalhamid.

The jury deliberated for several hours before reaching its verdict after a weeklong trial that saw testimony from the three men, who recounted how their stroll ended in bloodshed, and defence and prosecution psychiatric experts who offered differing views of Eaton's mental health and criminal culpability.

Eaton, 51, did not testify in his own defence. He stared ahead blankly as the verdict was read, standing alongside his lawyers — public defenders whom he tried to fire last week over his concerns that his defence hadn't been "adequately presented."

Judge John Pacht, who blocked Eaton's midtrial bid to act as his own lawyer, ordered him jailed pending sentencing, which has yet to be scheduled.

Awartani and Aliahmad watched from the front row of the courtroom gallery, smiling and hugging people around them.

"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," Awartani's mother, Elizabeth Price, told reporters afterward.

The men, all 20 at the time, had been visiting Awartani's grandmother for Thanksgiving. 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 traditional Palestinian scarves known as keffiyehs.

Eaton had pleaded not guilty but did not dispute that he was the shooter. He claimed that the CIA and Mossad transmitted their orders via FM radio and that God was commanding him to protect his Jewish neighbours. His lawyers had urged jurors to find him not guilty by reason of insanity, an outcome that would've spared him from prison but could have required that he undergo mental health treatment.

Defendant Jason Eaton listens in court on Sept. 14 in Burlington, Vt., as defence lawyer Margaret Jansch, right, speaks. (Glenn Russell/VTDigger/The Associated Press)Eaton's lawyers, Margaret Jansch and Joshua O'Hara, said he had struggled with mental health issues his whole life, including diagnoses of attention deficit, post-traumatic stress, bipolar, depression and borderline personality disorders, culminating in a psychotic break after losing his job at a credit union two weeks before the shooting.

O'Hara told jurors that Eaton claimed he started receiving messages while listening to a local NPR affiliate. 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 Sarah George countered that Eaton was a narcissist but not legally insane. He had a grandiose sense of self-importance and lacked empathy but was fully aware of the criminality of his conduct, George said in a closing argument. He repeatedly asked for a lawyer when approached by police and didn't claim at the time to be hearing messages directing his actions, she said.

Eaton didn't disclose to officers his possession of a Ruger .380-calibre handgun, later found in a bedroom dresser. Crime lab testing concluded it was used in the shooting, said George, the Chittenden County state's attorney.

The shooting, weeks after the start of the Israel-Hamas war, shook Burlington 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. It spawned calls for a hate crime investigation.

Days after the shooting, George said in her closing argument, Eaton had told his lawyers that he wished Awartani's grandmother had warned him that the men were "going to dress up like terrorists" and trek through his neighbourhood.

It was alleged that Eaton left the multi-unit white apartment house where he was staying to confront the three young men on Nov. 25, 2023. (Hasan Jamali/The Associated Press)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.

Awartani testified last week that 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 away, "he pulled out a handgun and started shooting at us," Awartani said.

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 in the right buttock.

Awartani, who was studying at Brown University in Rhode Island at the time, 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.