Vermont jury convicts man of attempted murder in shooting of three Palestinian students

A jury in the US state of Vermont has convicted a man of attempted murder for shooting three Palestinian college students in 2023, rejecting his defence that he was not guilty by reason of insanity.

Jason Eaton, 51, faces up to life in prison for the attack near the University of Vermont campus in Burlington. It left Hisham Awartani paralysed from the waist down and wounded his friends Tahseen Aliahmad and Kinnan Abdalhamid.

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The jury deliberated for several hours on Monday before reaching its verdict after a week-long trial that included testimony from the three men and psychiatric experts called by both the defence and prosecution.

Eaton was ordered jailed pending sentencing, which has yet to be scheduled.

Awartani and Aliahmad, who were sitting in the front row of the courtroom, smiled and hugged people around them as the verdict was read.

Eaton did not dispute that he shot the three men in November 2023. Instead, his lawyers argued that he should be found not guilty by reason of insanity.

The defence said Eaton was suffering from a delusional psychotic disorder and believed the CIA and Israel’s Mossad were transmitting messages to him through FM radio.

Joshua O’Hara, the supervising attorney at the Chittenden County Public Defender Office, told jurors that Eaton believed the intelligence agencies had enlisted him to “overwatch duty” to protect a Jewish family living across the street and that God was commanding him to act.

Prosecutors rejected the insanity defence, telling jurors that a state psychiatrist had concluded Eaton did not have a mental disease or defect and that the evidence showed he intended to kill the three men.

‘He pulled out a handgun and started shooting’

Awartani, Aliahmad and Abdalhamid, now 23, grew up together in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank before moving to the US for university.

They were visiting Awartani’s grandmother in Burlington over the Thanksgiving holiday when they went for a walk near the University of Vermont campus after dark.

Awartani testified that the friends were smoking cigarettes and speaking a mix of English and Arabic. Two of them were wearing keffiyehs.

He said Eaton was standing on the porch of the apartment building where he lived before approaching the friends without saying anything.

When Eaton was about five to 10 feet (1.5 to three metres) away, Awartani testified, he pulled out a handgun and began shooting.

Awartani, then a student at Brown University, was shot in the chest and left paralysed from the waist down. Aliahmad, who attended Trinity College, was shot in the collarbone, while Abdalhamid, a Haverford College student, was shot in the right buttock.

The shooting prompted calls for a hate crime investigation, but no hate crime charges were filed.

Police later found three shotguns in Eaton’s apartment as well as a Ruger .380-calibre handgun that crime laboratory testing identified as the weapon used in the shooting.