Vermont shooting trial opens with insanity defense in attack on 3 Palestinian students

A Vermont man who acknowledges shooting three Palestinian college students in Burlington in November 2023 went on trial Monday on attempted murder charges, with his lawyers arguing he was legally insane at the time.

Jason Eaton, 51, has pleaded not guilty but does not dispute that he fired the shots. He faces up to life in prison if convicted. Should the jury find him not guilty by reason of insanity, he could instead be ordered to receive mental health treatment.

The three victims — Hisham Awartani, Tahseen Aliahmad and Kinnan Abdalhamid — were all 20 at the time and are now 23. They grew up as schoolmates in Ramallah in the West Bank before moving to the United States for college. They testified one after another as Eaton watched from the defense table.

Awartani, then a student at Brown University, described how the three were smoking cigarettes and speaking a mix of English and Arabic while walking near the University of Vermont campus after dusk. Two of them wore traditional Palestinian scarves known as keffiyehs. He said he noticed Eaton standing on a porch as they approached the apartment house where he lived, and that within seconds Eaton walked toward them with an expressionless face and opened fire from about five to ten feet away.

Awartani was shot in the chest, with the bullet ricocheting off his scapula and causing paraplegia; he now uses a wheelchair. Aliahmad, a student at Trinity College, was struck in the collarbone. Abdalhamid, who attended Haverford College, fled and hid behind another home before realizing he had been wounded in the right buttock.

A neighbour in the same building, Jacob Pyne, testified that he heard four to six gunshots followed by footsteps going up the stairs. He said he ran outside, heard one man yelling that he had been shot, brought blankets and called 911.

Defense lawyer Joshua O'Hara told jurors that Eaton had lost his job at a credit union two weeks before the shooting and was suffering from a delusional, psychotic disorder. While listening to a local NPR affiliate, O'Hara said, Eaton believed he was receiving messages he attributed to the CIA. The messages initially seemed encouraging, the lawyer said, but later turned dark and insisted Eaton had to shoot someone. O'Hara said Eaton became convinced the CIA and Mossad were enlisting him for "overwatch duty" to protect a Jewish family living across the street, and that God was commanding him to protect his Jewish neighbours.

"These were delusions," O'Hara said, adding that Eaton believed he was doing something right and could not appreciate the wrongfulness of his conduct.

Prosecutor Sally Adams countered that a state psychiatrist who is slated to testify concluded Eaton had no mental disease or defect. She said evidence would show he intended to kill the men, was not legally justified and does not meet the test of legal insanity. Authorities found three shotguns in Eaton's apartment and a Ruger .380-caliber handgun that crime lab testing determined was used in the shooting; Eaton had bought the gun from a Vermont store seven months earlier.

"If the defense tries to focus on the story that Mr. Eaton tells about why he intended to kill these three young men, that story is only part of the whole picture," said Adams, chief administrative deputy at the Chittenden County State's Attorney's Office.

The shooting, which took place weeks after the start of the Israel-Hamas war, prompted calls for a hate crime investigation. No hate crime charges were filed, as questions persisted over whether anti-Palestinian animus, an altered mental state or another factor drove Eaton to fire.