Deliberations got under way in the Jason Eaton trial as jurors weigh his criminal responsibility for shooting three Palestinian college students outside of his Burlington apartment three years ago.
Judge John Pacht handed the case to the jury around 11:15 a.m. following a little over an hour of closing arguments on Monday morning.
Eaton, 51, faces three counts of attempted murder for the November 25, 2023, shooting of Kinnan Abdalhamid, Tahseen Ali Ahmad and Hisham Awartani. He could spend the rest of his life in prison, if convicted.
Eaton has maintained that he shot the young men after receiving messages through FM radio and Bluetooth urging him to kill. He has claimed to believe the three men — who all grew up in Gaza’s West Bank — were intending to harm a Jewish family in his neighborhood that he’d been watching over, testimony showed.
In reality, the three young men were on an evening stroll while visiting Awartani’s grandmother over the Thanksgiving holiday. All three survived the attack, but Awartani was left partially paralyzed.
In closing statements, defense attorney Peggy Jansch contended that an undiagnosed and untreated psychotic disorder caused Eaton to lose his grip on reality. The defense’s expert witness, Dr. Fabian Saleh, testified that Eaton’s deep delusions left him unable to decipher right from wrong.
“To this day, he is still of his belief,” Jansch said of her client.
Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George urged jurors to be skeptical of Saleh’s conclusions. She accused the psychiatrist of “tunnel vision,” saying he dismissed or ignored reams of records and statements that contradicted his theory.
The state’s expert witness, Dr. Jhilam Biswas, testified that while Eaton has a long history of mental health issues, he doesn’t suffer from the kind of severe illness that would cause the hallucinations he described before the attack. She did not offer a formal diagnosis but said Eaton meets the criteria for narcissistic personality disorder.
“Dr. Saleh himself stressed the importance of cherry-picking and not cherry-picking your pieces of information,” George said. “I encourage you to question: Did he take his own advice?”
George portrayed Eaton as a self-absorbed conspiracy theorist who was under immense stress. He had recently lost a job, putting his housing at risk, she said. He was also smoking marijuana daily.
She then pointed to his own words. While Eaton did not testify, jurors listened to audio recordings that his attorneys made of a conversation with him just five days after the men were shot, in which he confessed to the crime.
During that conversation, according to George, Eaton suggested that the shooting might not have happened if Awartani’s grandmother had notified him that the three young men would be walking through his neighborhood “dressed up like terrorists.”
Does that sound like someone with a delusional disorder? she asked jurors. Or does it sound like a narcissist who lacks empathy and harbors a “grandiose sense of self-importance?”
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