Vermont jury convicts Jason Eaton of attempted murder in 2023 shooting of three Palestinian students
Jason Eaton, 51, was found guilty over the November 2023 attack that left Hisham Awartani paralysed from the waist down and wounded Tahseen Aliahmad and Kinnan Abdalhamid. He faces up to life in prison.
A jury in Vermont on Monday convicted Jason Eaton of attempted murder in the November 2023 shooting of three Palestinian college students near the University of Vermont campus in Burlington, rejecting an insanity defence rooted in his claims that he was acting on orders from the CIA and Mossad.
Eaton, 51, was found guilty over the attack that left Hisham Awartani paralysed from the waist down and wounded his friends Tahseen Aliahmad and Kinnan Abdalhamid, all 20-year-old students at the time, the Associated Press reported (by Michael R. Sisak and Amanda Swinhart).
The jury deliberated for several hours after a week-long trial in which all three men testified. Eaton pleaded not guilty but did not dispute that he was the shooter. His lawyers argued he was not guilty by reason of insanity, pointing to 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, CNN reported.
Eaton faces up to life and was ordered jailed pending sentencing, which has yet to be scheduled. As the verdict was read, he stared ahead blankly while Awartani and Aliahmad, in the gallery’s front row, smiled and hugged those around them.
The shooting, weeks after the start of the Israel-Hamas war, prompted calls for a hate-crime investigation, but no hate-crime charges were filed. The three men grew up together in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank before moving to US universities, Al Jazeera reported.
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