A Vermont jury rejected an insanity defense and convicted Jason Eaton, 51, of attempted murder for the 2023 shooting of three Palestinian college students near the University of Vermont campus in Burlington.
Eaton stared ahead blankly as the verdict was read Monday, while two of his victims, Hisham Awartani and Tahseen Aliahmad, smiled and hugged people around them from the front row of the courtroom gallery. The jury deliberated several hours after a weeklong trial that featured testimony from the three wounded men and competing psychiatric experts.
Eaton had pleaded not guilty but never disputed he was the shooter. His lawyers argued he should be found not guilty by reason of insanity, pointing to his claims that the CIA and Mossad transmitted orders to him via FM radio and that God commanded him to protect his Jewish neighbors. Defense lawyer Joshua O’Hara told jurors that Eaton, who had lost his job at a credit union two weeks before the attack, believed he was hearing messages from the CIA while listening to a local NPR affiliate. At first the messages were encouraging and validating, O’Hara said, but they turned dark and insisted that Eaton “has to go out and shoot somebody.”
Prosecutor Sally Adams countered with forensic evidence, telling jurors that authorities found three shotguns in Eaton’s apartment and a Ruger.380-caliber handgun that crime lab testing matched to the shooting. Eaton had purchased the gun seven months earlier from a Vermont gun store.
Awartani, now 23, testified that he first noticed Eaton standing on a porch as he and his friends approached the apartment house where Eaton lived. Within seconds, Eaton was off the porch and walking toward them, his face expressionless, saying nothing. As Eaton got to about five to 10 feet away, “he pulled out a handgun and started shooting at us,” Awartani said. The bullet that struck Awartani in the chest ricocheted off his scapula and caused paraplegia in his spinal cord; he now uses a wheelchair.
Aliahmad, also now 23 and then a student at Trinity College in Connecticut, was struck in the collarbone. Abdalhamid, 23, a Haverford College student, fled and hid behind another home after seeing Aliahmad fall, only realizing later when he sat down that he too had been wounded in the right buttock.
Jacob Pyne, who lived in a different apartment in the same house as Eaton, told jurors he heard four to six gunshots followed by footsteps going up the stairs. He ran outside and heard two men speaking, one more vocal and yelling, “I’ve been shot, help me.” Pyne brought the men blankets and called 911.
The three friends, who grew up together in Ramallah in the West Bank before moving to the U.S. For college, had been visiting Awartani’s grandmother for the Thanksgiving holiday. They told jurors of their trip to a bowling alley to celebrate his twin cousins’ birthday and the walk they took after dusk near campus, smoking cigarettes and speaking a mix of English and Arabic. Two of them said they were wearing traditional Palestinian scarves known as keffiyehs.
The November 2023 shooting, coming weeks after the start of the Israel-Hamas war, spawned calls for a hate crime investigation, but no such charges were filed as questions persisted about whether anti-Palestinian animus, an altered mental state or something else had driven Eaton. Had the jury accepted the insanity defense, he could have been ordered to undergo mental health treatment rather than face prison.
Eaton was ordered jailed pending sentencing, which has yet to be scheduled, and faces up to life in prison.