A jury in Vermont, United States, has convicted 51-year-old Jason Eaton of attempted murder for shooting three Palestinian college students in Burlington in November 2023.
Eaton faces up to life in prison after jurors rejected his defence that he was not guilty by reason of insanity. He was ordered to remain in jail pending sentencing, which has not yet been scheduled.
The victims, Hisham Awartani, Tahseen Aliahmad and Kinnan Abdalhamid, were 20-year-old college students at the time of the attack and had grown up together in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.
The three were visiting Awartani’s grandmother during the Thanksgiving holiday when they went for a walk near the University of Vermont campus. Two of them were wearing keffiyehs when Eaton approached them and opened fire.
Awartani was shot in the chest and left paralysed from the waist down. Aliahmad suffered a gunshot wound to the collarbone, while Abdalhamid was shot in the right buttock.
Eaton did not deny shooting the students. His lawyers argued that he suffered from a delusional psychotic disorder and believed that the CIA and Israel’s Mossad were communicating with him through an FM radio.
Prosecutors rejected the insanity defence, arguing that Eaton understood his actions and intended to kill the three students. A state psychiatrist also testified that he did not have a mental disease or defect that would qualify for the defence.
The shooting sparked calls for a hate-crime investigation, although prosecutors did not file hate-crime charges.
Police later recovered three shotguns from Eaton’s apartment, along with a Ruger .380-calibre handgun that laboratory testing identified as the weapon used in the shooting.
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