A Vermont man is on trial for shooting 3 Palestinian students. He
claimed the CIA told him to do it
[September 15, 2026]
By MICHAEL R. SISAK
Jason Eaton insisted he was acting on orders from the CIA and Mossad
when he shot three Palestinian college students who were walking past
his home a few days after Thanksgiving. He said the U.S. and Israeli
intelligence agencies transmitted the messages to him via FM radio and
that God was commanding him to protect his Jewish neighbors.
Eaton’s claims were at the heart of his insanity defense as he went on
trial Monday on attempted murder charges in a case that shook
Burlington, Vermont, 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.
The November 2023 shooting, weeks after the start of the Israel-Hamas
war, spawned calls for a hate crime investigation. 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 on Hisham Awartani, Tahseen Aliahmad and Kinnan Abdalhamid,
who were all 20 at the time.
The men testified one after another as Eaton, now 51, watched stoically
from the defense table in a Burlington courtroom. He has pleaded not
guilty but doesn't dispute that he was the shooter. If convicted, he
faces up to life in prison. If found not guilty by reason of insanity,
he could be ordered to undergo mental health treatment.
Defense lawyer Joshua O’Hara, previewing testimony from a defense
psychiatrist, told jurors in an opening statement that Eaton was
suffering from a delusional, psychotic disorder after losing his job at
a credit union two weeks before the shooting.
While listening to a local NPR affiliate, Eaton believed he was hearing
messages that he attributed to the CIA, O’Hara said. 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.”
Prosecutor Sally Adams told jurors that a state psychiatrist who is
slated to testify concluded that Eaton did not have a mental disease or
defect. Evidence will show he intended to kill the men, was not legally
justified in shooting them, and does not meet the test of legal
insanity, Adams said.
Authorities found three shotguns in Eaton's apartment and a Ruger
.380-caliber handgun that crime lab testing concluded was the gun used
in the shooting, Adams said. Eaton had purchased the gun seven months
earlier from a Vermont gun store.
“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, the chief administrative deputy at
the Chittenden County State’s Attorney's Office.
Awartani, Aliahmad and Abdalhamid, all of whom are now 23, told jurors
of their holiday weekend visit to Awartani’s grandmother's house, a trip
to a bowling alley to celebrate his twin cousins' birthday, and the walk
they took near the University of Vermont campus after dusk that ended in
bloodshed.
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Jason Eaton appears in court during his trial in Burlington, Vt.,
Monday, Sept. 14, 2026. (Glenn Russell/Pool photo via AP)
Awartani, who was studying at Brown University in Rhode Island at
the time, said they were smoking cigarettes and speaking a mix of
English and Arabic. Two of them said they were wearing traditional
Palestinian scarves known as keffiyehs. Awartani said 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 five to 10 feet (1.5 to 3 meters) away, “he
pulled out a handgun and started shooting at us,” said Awartani, who
was paralyzed from the waist down in the shooting and now uses a
wheelchair.
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.
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 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.
O’Hara, the supervising attorney at the Chittenden County Public
Defender Office, told jurors that Eaton was confused by the messages
he said he was receiving, and became convinced that the CIA and
Mossad were enlisting him into “overwatch duty” to protect a Jewish
family living across the street.
“These were delusions,” O’Hara said. “He believed in the moment that
he was doing something that was right. He had been commanded to do
this. And that he did not have the ability to appreciate the
wrongfulness of his conduct in the moment because he believed he’d
been instructed to do this by a government agency or God.”
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