Nearly three years after a high-profile shooting that left one young man paralyzed and two others injured in Burlington, Vermont, a U.S. jury has delivered a guilty verdict on charges of attempted murder against 51-year-old shooter Jason Eaton, rejecting his legal team’s core argument that he was legally insane at the time of the attack.
The November 2023 attack targeted three 20-year-old Palestinian-American students: Hisham Awartani of Brown University, Tahseen Aliahmad of Trinity College, and Kinnan Abdalhamid of Haverford College. The three childhood friends, who had all attended school together in Ramallah, were in Vermont visiting Awartani’s grandmother for the Thanksgiving holiday when the violence occurred. According to court records and witness accounts, the group was walking near Eaton’s residential neighborhood, conversing in a mix of Arabic and English and wearing traditional Palestinian keffiyeh scarves, when Eaton opened fire on them.
The attack came just one month after the outbreak of the 2023 Israel-Gaza war, a period that documented national and international monitoring organizations have confirmed saw a sharp surge in anti-Palestinian hate, Islamophobia, and antisemitic incidents across the United States. The shooting left Awartani permanently paralyzed from the waist down, while Aliahmad and Abdalhamid recovered from non-fatal gunshot wounds.
Eaton never disputed that he fired the shots that struck the three students, but he entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. His defense team told the court that Eaton had experienced a severe psychotic breakdown following his unexpected layoff from a local credit union just weeks before the attack. Defense attorneys argued that Eaton had developed delusions that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Israeli intelligence agency Mossad were sending him instructions to commit violence through local radio broadcasts, claiming their client believed he was following orders from a government body or a divine power.
The week-long trial drew significant national attention, drawing testimony from all three surviving victims, as well as competing psychiatric evaluations from experts retained by both the prosecution and the defense. When the jury foreperson read the guilty verdict in the Burlington courtroom, multiple witnesses reported that Eaton remained motionless and stared blankly ahead. Awartani, who attended the trial in a wheelchair, and Aliahmad were observed smiling and embracing their loved ones in the courtroom after the verdict was announced.
Eaton is now scheduled to appear for sentencing at a later date, where he faces the possibility of multiple consecutive life sentences behind bars.