A Vermont man has been found criminally responsible in the 2023 shooting of three Palestinian college students in Burlington, just weeks after the Israel-Hamas war began.
A 12-person jury determined Monday that Jason Eaton, 51, was guilty on three counts of attempted second-degree murder in the shooting of Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ali Ahmad, who were all 20 at the time.
Eaton had pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, but he does not dispute that he shot the three men.
Awartani, Abdalhamid and Ali Ahmad, who knew one another from school in the West Bank and who moved to the U.S. for college, were spending their Thanksgiving break in Burlington when Eaton shot them. All three survived, but Awartani was paralyzed from the waist down after a bullet injured his spinal cord.
Eaton’s attorneys had mounted an insanity defense, arguing that their client was delusional and experiencing a psychotic disorder after losing his job two weeks before the shooting. Eaton, they said, believed he was acting on orders from the CIA and the Mossad when he shot the students.
During the trial, the defense team filed a motion arguing that the state had not proved an intent to kill in the shooting. Judge John Pacht denied the motion, telling Eaton’s attorneys, “I think the case law is pretty clear when someone uses a gun to shoot at someone else without justification.”
The case was one of several that illustrated the violent reverberations of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza across the U.S. To many, the widespread media coverage of the shooting also spoke to the dehumanization of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza; the three friends had grown up in Ramallah, where Palestinians are subjected to brutal systemic violence and discrimination by the Israeli state.
In a New York Times op-ed months after the shooting, Awartani wrote, “Instead of being maimed in Arab streets, we were shot in small-town America.”
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
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