The Vermont court jury on Monday (September 21) ruled that Vermont man Jason Eaton was guilty of attempted murder for shooting three Palestinian university students, and rejected his defense of committing the murder due to mental illness, which claimed he was acting on the orders of American and Israeli intelligence agencies.
Eaton could face life imprisonment for the attack that occurred in Burlington in November 2023. Judge John Pacht rejected Eaton’s request for self-representation during the trial and ordered him to be detained.
The incident left Hisham Awartani paralyzed from the waist down, and his friends Tahseen Aliahmad and Kinnan Abdalhamid injured.
At the time of the incident, these three young men were only 20 years old. They were walking near the University of Vermont campus, conversing in English and Arabic, with two of them wearing the traditional Palestinian scarves called “keffiyehs.”
Awartani testified in court last week that as they approached the apartment building where Eaton lived, he first noticed Eaton standing on the porch. Seconds later, Eaton came down from the porch and approached them with a blank expression, without saying a word. When he was about 5 to 10 feet (1.5 to 3 meters) away from them, “he pulled out a gun and started shooting at us.”
During the shooting, Awartani, a student at Brown University in Rhode Island, was shot in the chest, with the bullet bouncing off and hitting his shoulder blade, leading to paralysis below the spine. Aliahmad, a student at Trinity College in Connecticut, was shot in the collarbone, while Abdalhamid was shot in the right hip.
During the trial, experts on mental health from both the defense and prosecution testified, providing differing views on Eaton’s mental health condition and criminal responsibility.
Eaton’s lawyers urged the jury to find him not guilty by reason of insanity to avoid prison time but possibly require mental health treatment.
Eaton refused to plead guilty but did not deny being the shooter, claiming he was acting on the orders of the CIA and Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad. He claimed that both agencies communicated commands to him through frequency modulation and said God commanded him to protect his Jewish neighbors.
Currently, there is no reliable public evidence indicating Eaton’s religious background. Police had explicitly stated after the incident that they had no information about Eaton’s religious background.
Eaton’s lawyers stated that he had been struggling with mental health issues his whole life, including being diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder, depression, and borderline personality disorder, ultimately leading to a mental breakdown after losing his job at a credit union two weeks before the shooting.
Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George countered that Eaton was narcissistic but not legally insane.
Awartani’s mother, Elizabeth Price, said Eaton should be charged with a hate crime. The shooting incident occurred weeks after the outbreak of a war between Israel and Hamas, shocking Burlington and causing strong reactions in the West Bank.
She had called for an investigation into the hate crime but ultimately hate crime charges were not brought.