US Court Convicts 51-Year-Old Man For Shooting Three Palestinian Students
A 51-year-old American man, Jason Eaton, has been convicted of attempted murder for shooting three Palestinian college students in Vermont in 2023 after claiming he was acting under delusional orders from the CIA and Israel’s Mossad, who he believed were transmitting messages to him through FM radio to protect a Jewish family on “overwatch duty” and that God commanded him to shoot.
According to a report by Al Jazeera, a jury in Vermont found Eaton guilty and rejected his defence of not guilty by reason of insanity. The report noted that Eaton now faces up to life in prison for the attack near the University of Vermont campus in Burlington which left Hisham Awartani paralysed from the waist down, while Tahseen Aliahmad and Kinnan Abdalhamid were wounded.
Al Jazeera reported that the jury deliberated for several hours on Monday after a week-long trial that featured testimonies from the three victims and psychiatric experts from both sides. Eaton was ordered jailed pending sentencing.
Eaton did not dispute that he shot the men in November 2023. His lawyer, Joshua O’Hara of the Chittenden County Public Defender Office, told jurors his client was suffering from a delusional psychotic disorder.
Prosecutors countered that a state psychiatrist concluded Eaton had no mental disease or defect and that evidence showed he intended to kill the three men.
The victims, now 23, grew up together in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank before moving to the US for university. They were visiting Awartani’s grandmother in Burlington over Thanksgiving when they went for a walk after dark, speaking a mix of English and Arabic. Two were wearing keffiyehs.
Awartani, then at Brown University, testified that Eaton stood on his apartment porch, approached silently, and from five to 10 feet away pulled a handgun and started shooting. He was shot in the chest and left paralysed. Aliahmad of Trinity College was shot in the collarbone and Abdalhamid of Haverford College in the right buttock.
Though the shooting sparked calls for a hate crime probe, no hate crime charges were filed. Police later recovered three shotguns and the Ruger .380-calibre handgun identified as the murder weapon from Eaton’s apartment.
