A Vermont jury on Monday delivered a unanimous verdict finding Jason Eaton guilty of attempting to murder three Palestinian students in 2023. Eaton admitted to the shooting incident that occurred in November 2023, during which he shot Hisham Awartani, Tahseen Aliahmad, and Kinnan Abdalhamid while they were walking in his neighborhood. He attempted to plead not guilty by reason of insanity, claiming he was experiencing a psychotic episode at the time of the shootings.
Eaton's insanity defense was rejected by jurors at Chittenden Superior criminal court, who found him guilty on three counts of second-degree attempted murder after several hours of deliberation following a weeklong trial. Judge John Pacht ordered Eaton to be jailed pending sentencing, which has not yet been scheduled. He faces a potential sentence of up to life in prison.
All three students survived the attack and provided testimony during the trial. They had previously lived in the West Bank and became schoolmates in Ramallah before relocating to the United States for their college education; Abdalhamid is enrolled at Haverford College, Awartani at Brown University, and Aliahmad at Trinity College. Although all three survived the shooting in Burlington's Old North End, the attack left Awartani paralyzed from the waist down.
At the time of the shooting, the students were visiting Awartani's grandmother in Vermont for Thanksgiving. Eaton confessed to targeting them, with his lawyers arguing that he was in a psychotic state, believing that the CIA and Israel's Mossad were communicating with him through an FM radio and Bluetooth, instructing him to commit the shootings. Defense Attorney Joshua O'Hara stated, "He believed he’d been instructed to do this by a government agency or God."
Awartani's mother, Elizabeth Price, expressed her approval of the guilty verdict in comments to reporters, stating, "The 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."