BURLINGTON, VT — A Vermont man who does not deny pulling the trigger went on trial Monday on three counts of second-degree attempted murder for shooting three Palestinian college students during a quiet Thanksgiving weekend walk near the University of Vermont campus in November 2023.
Jason Eaton, now 51, sat stoically at the defense table in Chittenden County Superior Court as jurors heard sharply opposing accounts of his mental state and intent. Eaton has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. His defense argues he was gripped by a full psychotic break, convinced that covert intelligence agencies were ordering him to open fire. Prosecutors counter that a state psychiatrist found he had no qualifying mental disease and that evidence clearly shows he intended to kill. If convicted, Eaton faces up to life in prison. If found not guilty by reason of insanity, he would be committed to a Vermont psychiatric facility for treatment of an indefinite duration.
The three victims — Hisham Awartani, Tahseen Aliahmad, and Kinnan Abdalhamid — were each 20 years old at the time of the shooting. The men grew up together in Ramallah in the West Bank and later moved to the United States for college. Awartani was enrolled at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island; Aliahmad attended Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut; and Abdalhamid was a student at Haverford College near Philadelphia. They had gathered in Burlington for a holiday weekend visit to Awartani’s grandmother. On the evening of the shooting, the three friends spent time at a local bowling alley celebrating the birthday of Awartani’s twin cousins before setting out on foot near the university campus after dark. Awartani testified Monday that the group was talking, smoking cigarettes, and speaking a mix of English and Arabic. Two of the three were wearing traditional Palestinian keffiyeh scarves. Awartani said he first spotted Eaton standing silently on a porch as they approached the apartment building where Eaton lived. Within seconds, he said, Eaton stepped off the porch and walked directly toward them. “His face was expressionless and he didn’t say anything,” Awartani told the jury. “He pulled out a handgun and started shooting at us.” Awartani, who now uses a wheelchair after being paralyzed from the waist down, testified from the witness stand at age 23.
According to prosecutors, Eaton used a Ruger .380-caliber handgun that crime lab testing confirmed was the weapon fired during the attack. Eaton had legally purchased the gun from a Vermont gun store seven months before the shooting. Authorities also found three shotguns inside his apartment. Awartani was struck in the chest; the bullet ricocheted off his scapula and damaged his spinal cord, causing permanent paralysis from the waist down. Aliahmad was hit in the collarbone. Abdalhamid, after seeing Aliahmad fall, fled and hid behind a nearby home, only realizing later that he too had been shot — in the right buttock. Jacob Pyne, a neighbor who lived in a separate unit within the same building as Eaton, testified that he heard four to six gunshots followed by the sound of footsteps going up the apartment stairs. He said he ran outside, heard one man shouting that he had been shot and needed help, and brought blankets to the wounded men before calling 911. Jurors also heard recordings of frantic 911 calls placed at the scene, including one in which Awartani can be heard pleading for help while lying on the pavement.
Defense attorney Joshua O’Hara, the supervising attorney at the Chittenden County Public Defender Office, told jurors in his opening statement that Eaton had lost his job at a credit union just two weeks before the shooting and had descended into a severe delusional and psychotic state. O’Hara said that while listening to a local NPR affiliate station, Eaton became convinced the broadcasts contained hidden messages he attributed to the CIA and Israel’s Mossad intelligence service. At first, O’Hara said, those messages were encouraging and validating. Over time, however, they turned darker, ultimately insisting that Eaton “has to go out and shoot somebody.” O’Hara told jurors that Eaton came to believe he had been recruited into what he understood as “overwatch duty” — a mission to protect a Jewish family living across the street from his apartment. O’Hara also said Eaton believed God was directing his actions. “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 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.” The defense said it plans to call a psychiatrist to support those claims.
Deputy State’s Attorney Sally Adams, the chief administrative deputy at the Chittenden County State’s Attorney’s Office, offered a starkly different portrait of Eaton. Adams told jurors that a state psychiatrist whose testimony is expected during the trial concluded that Eaton did not have a mental disease or defect that would qualify him for a legal insanity finding. Adams argued that Eaton fully understood what he was doing was wrong and that the evidence would show he intended to kill all three men. Adams also pointed to Eaton’s behavior when law enforcement arrived to serve a search warrant after the shooting: rather than answer the door, Eaton hid inside a vehicle. “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 told the jury. Prosecutors noted the presence of three shotguns in Eaton’s home alongside the handgun used in the attack, and emphasized that the purchase of that handgun months in advance undercut the notion of an impulsive mental crisis.
The November 2023 shooting took place just weeks after the start of the Israel-Hamas war and immediately triggered calls for hate crime charges. Investigators and community members questioned whether anti-Palestinian bias had driven the attack, in part because the victims were visibly identifiable as Palestinian — two were wearing keffiyehs and the group was speaking Arabic at the time Eaton approached. However, prosecutors have not filed hate crime enhancements, saying there is insufficient explicit evidence of anti-Palestinian bias as a legal motive. The case drew national attention and reverberated internationally, including in the West Bank city of Ramallah, where the three victims had grown up and attended school together before coming to the United States. All three men, now 23, testified Monday, appearing one after another before jurors. Awartani, Aliahmad, and Abdalhamid each described the events of that evening, beginning with the birthday outing at the bowling alley and ending with the moments after the gunfire.
The trial is unfolding in Chittenden County Superior Court in Burlington. The central legal question before jurors is whether Eaton meets Vermont’s standard for legal insanity — a bar that requires a defendant to have been unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of his actions due to a mental disease or defect. Both sides have indicated their respective psychiatrists will offer conflicting conclusions on that point, making expert testimony a pivotal part of the proceedings. Eaton does not contest that he fired the shots. The outcome will hinge on whether jurors accept the defense’s account of a psychotic break or the prosecution’s argument that Eaton acted with deliberate, criminal intent. A conviction on all three counts of second-degree attempted murder could result in a life sentence. An insanity verdict would result in indefinite psychiatric commitment rather than prison time.
As of Monday, opening arguments were complete and witness testimony was underway. All three victims have testified, as has Eaton’s neighbor Jacob Pyne. Jurors are expected to hear from the competing psychiatric experts as the trial continues in the coming days, with the state’s psychiatrist and the defense’s psychiatrist both scheduled to take the stand.
