Burlington trial: shooter of Palestinian students cites CIA delusions

A Vermont man told jurors he was acting on orders from the CIA and Mossad when he shot three Palestinian college students near his home in November 2023. Jason Eaton, 51, is on trial in Burlington on attempted murder charges in a shooting that left one victim paralyzed and drew calls for a hate crime investigation.

Eaton’s claims were central to his insanity defense as testimony began Monday in Chittenden County court. He has pleaded not guilty but does not dispute being 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 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, O’Hara said, Eaton believed he was hearing messages he attributed to the CIA.

“At first, the messages were encouraging and validating,” O’Hara said, but later messages insisted that Eaton “has to go out and shoot somebody.”

O’Hara, the supervising attorney at the Chittenden County Public Defender Office, told jurors Eaton became convinced 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.”

Prosecutor Sally Adams told jurors a state psychiatrist slated to testify concluded Eaton did not have a mental disease or defect. Evidence will show he intended to kill the men and does not meet the test of legal insanity, Adams said.

“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.

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.

The November 2023 shooting came weeks after the start of the Israel-Hamas war. The wounded men, Hisham Awartani, Tahseen Aliahmad and Kinnan Abdalhamid, had grown up together in Ramallah in the West Bank before moving to the U.S. for college. They were all 20 at the time.

The three testified one after another as Eaton watched from the defense table. They described a 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 gunfire.

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 said they were wearing keffiyehs, traditional Palestinian scarves. 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 with an expressionless face. At about five to 10 feet away, “he pulled out a handgun and started shooting at us,” Awartani said. He was paralyzed from the waist down in the shooting and now uses a wheelchair.

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. 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 he heard four to six gunshots followed by footsteps going up the stairs. He said he ran outside and heard one of the men yelling, “I’ve been shot, help me.” Pyne brought the men blankets and called 911.

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.