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BURLINGTON, Vermont: A jury on Monday convicted a Vermont man of attempted murder in the shootings of three Palestinian college students who were walking near his home, rejecting an insanity defense rooted in his claims that he was acting on orders from US and Israeli intelligence agencies.<\/p>\n
Jason Eaton faces up to life in prison in the November 2023 attack in Burlington, which paralyzed Hisham Awartani from the waist down and wounded his friends, Tahseen Aliahmad and Kinnan Abdalhamid.<\/p>\n
The men, all 20 at the time, had been visiting Awartani\u2019s grandmother for Thanksgiving. They were smoking cigarettes and speaking a mix of English and Arabic as they walked near the University of Vermont campus after dusk. Two of them were wearing traditional Palestinian scarves known as keffiyehs.<\/p>\n
The jury deliberated for several hours before reaching its verdict after a weeklong trial that saw testimony from the three men, who recounted how their stroll ended in bloodshed, and defense and prosecution psychiatric experts who offered differing views of Eaton\u2019s mental health and criminal culpability.<\/p>\n
Eaton, 51, stared ahead blankly as the verdict was read, standing alongside his lawyers \u2014 public defenders whom he tried to fire last week over his concerns that his defense hadn\u2019t been \u201cadequately presented.\u201d Judge John Pacht, who blocked Eaton\u2019s midtrial bid to act as his own lawyer, ordered him jailed pending sentencing, which has yet to be scheduled.<\/p>\n
Awartani and Aliahmad watched from the front row of the courtroom gallery, smiling and hugging people around them.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe verdict cannot undo what happened or erase the trauma our families still carry, but it affirms something fundamental: Jason Eaton is responsible for what he did,\u201d Awartani\u2019s mother, Elizabeth Price, told reporters afterward.<\/p>\n
Eaton claimed he was acting on orders from the CIA and Mossad<\/strong><\/p>\n Eaton had pleaded not guilty but did not dispute that he was the shooter. He claimed that the CIA and Mossad transmitted their orders via FM radio and that God was commanding him to protect his Jewish neighbors. His lawyers had urged jurors to find him not guilty by reason of insanity, an outcome that would\u2019ve spared him from prison but could have required that he undergo mental health treatment.<\/p>\n Eaton\u2019s lawyers, Margaret Jansch and Joshua O\u2019Hara, said he had struggled with mental health issues his whole life, including diagnoses of attention deficit, post-traumatic stress, bipolar, depression and borderline personality disorders, culminating in a psychotic break after losing his job at a credit union two weeks before the shooting.<\/p>\n Prosecutor Sarah George countered that Eaton was a narcissist but not legally insane. He had a grandiose sense of self-importance and lacked empathy but was fully aware of the criminality of his conduct, George said in a closing argument. He appeared nervous when police arrived at his door, repeatedly asked for a lawyer and hasn\u2019t claimed to have received any other messages directing his actions, she said.<\/p>\n Eaton told officers that he had a shotgun in his apartment, but didn\u2019t disclose that he had other weapons, including a Ruger .380-caliber handgun that was found in a bedroom dresser and that crime lab testing concluded was used in the shooting, George said.<\/p>\n Victim\u2019s mother says Eaton should\u2019ve been charged with hate crimes<\/strong><\/p>\n The shooting, weeks after the start of the Israel-Hamas war, shook Burlington, and reverberated in the West Bank, where the three wounded men grew up and became friends as schoolmates in Ramallah before moving to the US for college. It spawned calls for a hate crime investigation.<\/p>\n But no hate crime charges were filed as questions persisted about whether anti-Palestinian animus, an altered mental state or something else had compelled Eaton to open fire. After the verdict, Awartani\u2019s mother said Eaton\u2019s hateful rhetoric, aired at the trial, had made it clear why he targeted her son.<\/p>\n Days after the shooting, George said in her closing argument, Eaton had told his lawyers that he wished Awartani\u2019s grandmother had warned him that the men were \u201cgoing to dress up like terrorists\u201d and trek through his neighborhood.<\/p>\n \u201cOr see, if grandma had said to them, you know, maybe now\u2019s not a great time to wear that thing on your head,\u201d George said, paraphrasing Eaton\u2019s remarks. \u201cYou know, things are a little tense when you\u2019ve got American hostages over in Palestine, and we\u2019re trying to get them back.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThey were not the words of a man confused about who he shot or why,\u201d Elizabeth Price said. \u201cThey were the words a man who saw three young men speaking the language of their childhood and wearing what made them feel closer to their far away families and homes and decided to kill them because of his own prejudices.\u201d<\/p>\n Victims recounted how a peaceful walk ended in bloodshed<\/strong><\/p>\n Awartani testified last week that he first noticed Eaton standing on a porch as they approached the apartment house where he lived. Within seconds, Awartani said, Eaton was off the porch and walking toward them. His face was expressionless and he didn\u2019t say anything. As Eaton got to about 5 to 10 feet (1.5 to 3 meters) away, \u201che pulled out a handgun and started shooting at us,\u201d Awartani said.<\/p>\n Abdalhamid, a student at Haverford College near Philadelphia, said he fled and hid behind another home after seeing Aliahmad fall to the ground. He said he only realized later when he sat down that he had also been wounded.<\/p>\n Awartani, who was studying at Brown University in Rhode Island at the time, was shot in the chest and the bullet ricocheted off his scapula, causing paraplegia in his spinal cord. Aliahmad, who was a student at Trinity College in Connecticut, was struck in the collarbone, and Abdalhamid was shot in the right buttock.<\/p>\n Jacob Pyne, who lived in a different apartment in the same house as Eaton, testified that he heard four to six gunshots, followed by footsteps going up the stairs of the apartment house. He said he ran outside and heard two men speaking, one of whom was more vocal and yelling, \u201cI\u2019ve been shot, help me.\u201d He then brought the men blankets and called 911.<\/p>\n Eaton didn\u2019t testify. In an opening statement last week, O\u2019Hara told jurors that Eaton claimed he started receiving messages while listening to a local NPR affiliate. At first, the messages were encouraging and validating, the lawyer said, but subsequent messages turned dark, insisting that Eaton \u201chas to go out and shoot somebody.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n