Updated at 4:15 p.m.
A jury on Monday convicted Jason Eaton for shooting three Palestinian college students outside his Burlington apartment, rejecting his insanity defense.
Eaton had admitted to the November 25, 2023, attack, which injured Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ali Ahmad and partially paralyzed Hisham Awartani. But Eaton’s attorneys contended that he was legally insane at the time and suffering from severe psychotic delusions.
Jurors deliberated for just two hours before finding Eaton guilty on three counts of attempted murder. He will be sentenced at a later date and faces the potential of life in prison.
Eaton stood still as Judge John Pacht asked jurors one by one to affirm their verdict. The defendant did not noticeably react, besides briefly locking eyes with his mother and aunt before he was escorted out of the courtroom.
The two victims in attendance on Monday — Awartani and Ali Ahmad — hugged family members and prosecutors before heading into a private room.
Speaking to reporters afterward, Awartani’s mother, Elizabeth Price, expressed a deep sense of relief. “The verdict cannot undo what happened or erase the trauma our families still carry,” Price said. “But it affirms something fundamental: Jason Eaton is responsible for what he did.”
Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George, meanwhile, told reporters that she was grateful for the chance to get to know the victims, despite the tragic circumstances. “I’ve spent a lot of time with them,” she said. “I’m honored for the chance to bring them closure.”
She added that she would meet with the families again before deciding the length of sentence she’ll seek.
Eaton’s defense team declined to comment.
The verdict capped a six-day trial during which jurors heard conflicting expert testimony about whether Eaton suffered from a severe mental illness that led to a break from reality he described before the attack.
To claim insanity in Vermont, defendants must prove that they had a “mental disease or defect” that prevented them from understanding they were about to commit a crime.
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 intended to harm a Jewish family he’d been watching over in his neighborhood, testimony showed.
In reality, the three young men were visiting Awartani’s grandmother over the Thanksgiving holiday. They testified last week that a man matching Eaton’s description walked up to them and, without saying a word, opened fire.
The shooting, just weeks after Hamas’ attack on Israel, attracted worldwide attention.
The defense’s expert witness, Dr. Fabian Saleh, testified that Eaton had an untreated psychotic disorder that left him unable to distinguish right from wrong.
“He was operating under the delusional belief that this was a legal, authorized action,” Saleh said last week. “He didn’t consider his actions to be criminal.”
Prosecutors disputed Saleh’s conclusions. They said Eaton has never been diagnosed with a psychotic disorder and has shown no symptoms of psychosis — despite not receiving medication during his nearly three years in prison awaiting trial.
And while prosecutors fell short of offering a motive for the shooting, they argued that Eaton carried it out at a time when his life was falling apart.
He had recently been fired from a finance company because he accused its leaders of stealing, putting him at risk of losing his apartment, testimony showed. He was also smoking cannabis daily, prosecutors said, suggesting that may have amplified his already entrenched paranoia.
Eaton, who repeatedly criticized his attorneys when the jury wasn’t in the room, did not take the stand. But a conversation he had with them five days after the shooting proved to be one of the most important pieces of evidence, held up by both sides as proof of their arguments.
Defense attorneys played pieces of the recording aloud for jurors, contending that the conversation clearly showed that Eaton had lost his grip on reality. Eaton could be heard spooling out a hard-to-follow narrative describing how the radio messages — from the Central Intelligence Agency, God and even his own ancestors — kept urging him to act.
But the recordings also captured Eaton displaying a sense of self-awareness that prosecutors called highly unusual for someone who harbors serious delusions.
“I was either talking to my ancestors and the divine council or talking to an intelligence agency using an incredible AI that could come through my FM radio, through my Bluetooth headset, through my phone — or I’ve had this incredible psychotic break,” Eaton said in the recording.
“I’m still confused,” Eaton added. “I still don’t know the answer. Were they innocent victims? Were they planning an attack? [Did I] somehow thwart something?”
A psychiatrist who testified on behalf of the prosecution, Dr. Jhilam Biswas, told jurors that people with serious delusions rarely have such insight into what they’re experiencing.
George, the prosecutor, also urged jurors to consider portions of Eaton’s November 2023 conversation that hadn’t been played aloud in court.
Reading from a transcript, she quoted Eaton as suggesting that the shooting might not have happened had Awartani’s grandmother notified him that the three young men would be walking through his neighborhood “dressed up like terrorists.”
“If grandma had said to them, ‘Maybe now is not a great time to wear the thing on their head,’” Eaton said, according to George. The night of the shooting, two of the three men were wearing traditional Palestinian headscarves known as keffiyehs.
During the taped conversation, Eaton also mentioned the stalled negotiations between Israel and Hamas and how Hamas had not released the Israeli hostages it had taken weeks before, on October 7.
“March through Ukraine with a Russian flag right now, you bet your day wouldn’t go well,” he said, according to George.
The victims and their families have maintained that the men were targeted because they are Palestinian. Authorities initially suggested that the shooting may constitute a hate crime but were unable to find evidence that would prove Eaton harbored anti-Palestinian views.
It was not until Eaton agreed to raise an insanity defense this summer — at the eleventh hour, mere weeks before his trial was originally scheduled — that his defense team entered the November 30, 2023, conversation into discovery.
Awartani’s mother, Elizabeth Price, said on Monday that there should no longer be any doubt about Eaton’s motive.
“We heard it, in his own words,” she said. “This was a hate crime. We have said so from the beginning. The law never made him answer for it. But we know what he did.”
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
