Jury convicts Vermont man of attempted murder in shooting of 3
Palestinian students
[September 22, 2026]
By MICHAEL R. SISAK and AMANDA SWINHART
Burlington, Vt. (AP) — 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 U.S. and Israeli
intelligence agencies.
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.
The men, all 20 at the time, had been visiting Awartani’s 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.
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's mental health
and criminal culpability.
Eaton, 51, stared ahead blankly as the verdict was read, standing
alongside his lawyers — public defenders whom he tried to fire last week
over his concerns that his defense hadn’t been “adequately presented.”
Judge John Pacht, who blocked Eaton’s midtrial bid to act as his own
lawyer, ordered him jailed pending sentencing, which has yet to be
scheduled.
Awartani and Aliahmad watched from the front row of the courtroom
gallery, smiling and hugging people around them.
“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,” Awartani’s mother, Elizabeth Price, told
reporters afterward.
Eaton claimed he was acting on orders from the CIA and Mossad
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’ve spared him from prison but could
have required that he undergo mental health treatment.
Eaton's lawyers, Margaret Jansch and Joshua O’Hara, 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.
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't claimed to have
received any other messages directing his actions, she said.
Eaton told officers that he had a shotgun in his apartment, but didn't
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, said George, the Chittenden County
state’s attorney.
Victim’s mother says Eaton should’ve been charged with hate crimes
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 U.S. for college. It spawned calls for a hate crime
investigation.
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Jason Eaton appears in court during his trial in Burlington, Vt.,
Monday, Sept. 21, 2026. (Paul Heintz/The Boston Globe via AP, Pool)
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’s
mother said Eaton's hateful rhetoric, aired at the trial, had made it
clear why he targeted her son.
Days after the shooting, George said in her closing argument, Eaton had
told his lawyers that he wished Awartani’s grandmother had warned him
that the men were “going to dress up like terrorists” and trek through
his neighborhood.
“Or see, if grandma had said to them, you know, maybe now’s not a great
time to wear that thing on your head," George said, paraphrasing Eaton's
remarks. “You know, things are a little tense when you’ve got American
hostages over in Palestine, and we’re trying to get them back."
“They were not the words of a man confused about who he shot or why,”
Elizabeth Price said. “They 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.”
Victims recounted how a peaceful walk ended in bloodshed
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’t say anything. As Eaton got to
about 5 to 10 feet (1.5 to 3 meters) away, “he pulled out a handgun and
started shooting at us,” Awartani said.
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.
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.
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, “I’ve been shot, help me.” He then brought the men blankets and
called 911.
Eaton didn't testify. In an opening statement last week, O’Hara 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 “has to go out and shoot somebody.”
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