Burlington shooting suspect blames CIA, says God ordered attack

A Burlington, Vermont, man on trial for shooting three Palestinian college students told jurors he was acting on orders from the CIA and Mossad, claiming the U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies transmitted the messages to him through FM radio and that God commanded him to protect his Jewish neighbors. Jason Eaton’s account of receiving those messages formed the core of his insanity defense as he went on trial Monday on attempted murder charges in a case that the source described as having shaken Burlington and reverberated in the West Bank.

Eaton, now 51, has pleaded not guilty but does not 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.

The shooting happened in November 2023, a few days after Thanksgiving, weeks after the start of the Israel-Hamas war. The wounded students were Hisham Awartani, Tahseen Aliahmad and Kinnan Abdalhamid, who were all 20 at the time and grew up in Ramallah before moving to the U.S. for college.

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.

Defense lawyer Joshua O’Hara 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. O’Hara, previewing testimony from a defense psychiatrist, said that while listening to a local NPR affiliate, Eaton believed he was hearing messages he attributed to the CIA. The messages were first encouraging, O’Hara said, but later insisted that Eaton “has to go out and shoot somebody.”

“These were delusions. 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,” O’Hara said.

O’Hara is the supervising attorney at the Chittenden County Public Defender Office.

Prosecutor Sally Adams told jurors that a state psychiatrist slated to testify concluded that Eaton did not have a mental disease or defect. Adams said 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.

“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,” Adams said.

Adams is the chief administrative deputy at the Chittenden County State’s Attorney’s Office.

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.

Awartani, Aliahmad and Abdalhamid, all of whom are now 23, testified one after another as Eaton watched stoically from the defense table. Awartani, who was studying at Brown University in Rhode Island at the time, said they had been smoking cigarettes and speaking a mix of English and Arabic near the University of Vermont campus after dusk when the shooting occurred. Two of the men said they were wearing traditional Palestinian scarves known as keffiyehs.

“He pulled out a handgun and started shooting at us,” Awartani said.

Awartani said he first noticed Eaton standing on a porch. Within seconds, he said, Eaton was off the porch and walking toward them with an expressionless face and saying nothing.

Awartani was shot in the chest and the bullet ricocheted off his scapula, causing paraplegia in his spinal cord. He is now paralyzed from the waist down and uses a wheelchair. Aliahmad, who was a student at Trinity College in Connecticut, was struck in the collarbone. Abdalhamid, a student at Haverford College near Philadelphia, 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. He said he ran outside and brought the men blankets and called 911.