Three Palestinian men recounted in a Burlington courtroom on Monday their wordless encounter with a gunman who shot them without warning, leaving one of them partially paralyzed.
Jason Eaton, 51, is charged with three counts of second-degree attempted murder for the November 25, 2023 shooting of Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ali Ahmad. He faces a potential life sentence if convicted.
Defense attorneys representing Eaton painted him as a man who believed that a shadowy government agency was using public radio to send him orders to kill. The outcome of his trial will hinge almost entirely on the testimony of psychiatric experts who have reached differing conclusions about whether Eaton was legally sane at the time of the crime.
First, though, prosecutors must prove Eaton pulled the trigger. Vermont law allows defendants to raise insanity defenses without admitting to the underlying crime.
Eaton, wearing a navy blue suit and white running sneakers, remained silent and paid close attention as prosecutors walked nearly a dozen witnesses through testimony meant to establish the bare facts of the case.
Testifying from a wheelchair, Awartani described for jurors the day his life was forever altered.
He said he was visiting relatives in Burlington with Abdalhamid and Ali Ahmad, with whom he had grown up in the West Bank. The three 20-year-old men were walking along North Prospect Street around dusk when Awartani saw a skinny man with a gray beard step down from a nearby porch, walk toward them and, without speaking, pull out a handgun.
“I first heard a gunshot and then two more gunshots, and I fell to the ground,” Awartani said.
Awartani managed to pull out his phone and dial 911. Jurors listened to a recording of his plea for help.
“I think I’m gonna die,” he said with eerie calmness.
The dispatcher asked if anyone was applying pressure to the wound. Awartani replied he wasn’t exactly sure where he’d been hit.
“I thought you said your chest?” the dispatcher replied.
“Yeah, but I can’t feel anything,” Awartani said.
Ali Ahmad, who was also shot in the chest, said he played dead. Abdalhamid, shot in the buttocks, said he ran away, jumped a fence and asked a neighbor for help before realizing he’d been struck.
Jurors also heard from doctors who treated the men and federal agents who knocked on Eaton’s door the day after the shooting. When Eaton answered, he said something to the effect of, “I’ve been waiting for you,” the agents recounted.
The prosecution will continue on Tuesday with more law enforcement witnesses, who will testify about finding a handgun and bullets in Eaton’s apartment that matched what was used in the shooting.
What prosecutors will not be able to offer during the trial: a clear motive for the crime.
The men and their families believe they were targeted because they are Palestinian, pointing out that they had been speaking a mix of Arabic and English that evening. Two were wearing traditional Palestinian headscarves known as keffiyehs.
And yet prosecutors found no proof that the accused shooter harbored anti-Palestinian views. As Seven Days previously reported, Eaton had posted messages on social media that seemed to express sympathy for the Palestinian cause.
The matter of identity nevertheless arose immediately in the Burlington courtroom as more than two dozen spectators filtered in wearing keffiyehs in support of the shooting victims. Before bringing in the jury, Judge John Pacht ordered that the scarves be removed. He allowed the three men to wear theirs during their testimony, noting some had been wearing the scarves on that night.
“While I completely understand the desire to show support for folks here, I am equally concerned with how that might impact a jury in terms of sympathies,” Pacht told the crowd. “Everything that is decided in this courtroom must be decided solely on the evidence.”
Prosecutors hope to rest their case on Tuesday. The defense will begin Wednesday morning, before prosecutors have a chance to call rebuttal witnesses, including their own expert.
In his opening statement, public defender Josh O’Hara previewed a defense that will focus on Eaton’s state of mind at the time of the shooting. Without conceding that his client actually shot the men, O’Hara said Eaton was suffering from a delusional disorder that made him incapable of understanding that what he did was wrong.
Those delusions manifested in the belief that he was receiving messages from the Central Intelligence Agency while listening to Vermont Public Radio, O’Hara said.
At first, the messages were encouraging, and Eaton, who liked to “investigate” things in his free time, saw them as validation, according to O’Hara. But on the night in question, they took a sinister turn, encouraging him to kill.
Eaton, who had come to believe that he had a duty to watch over and protect a Jewish family that lived in an apartment across the street, suspected these darker messages were coming from a different agency, possibly one connected to Israel, according to O’Hara.
The messages seemed to suggest that he needed to act by a certain time that night, but Eaton wasn’t sure who the intended target was, O’Hara said — until he saw the three men walking down the street. Struggling to comprehend the message, Eaton started to pray, looking for guidance.
The men were no longer in Eaton’s line of sight by then, O’Hara said. But in his “mind’s eye,” he saw them turn around and knew they would soon pass his apartment a second time.
Eaton believed that vision came “either from God or this intelligence group,” and he took it as confirmation “that he had to shoot,” O’Hara explained.
“He believed at that moment that he was doing something that was right,” the defense attorney said.
Jurors heard a much different version from prosecutor Sally Adams, who, in her opening statement, acknowledged the obvious question of motive by raising a series of rhetorical questions — which she then quickly set aside.
“‘Why are we here? How could this have happened? He has to be crazy to do this, right?’” she said. “That’s not the question you have to answer.”
What matters is whether Eaton understood what he was doing, Adams said. She told jurors to be skeptical of the defense expert’s claim that Eaton was too mentally ill to comprehend his actions.
“What facts did they rely on? What data did they rely on? What records did they look at? Who did they talk to?” she said.
She encouraged the jury to consider what Eaton might have to gain by spinning his conspiracy-laden story. She said the evidence will show that Eaton suffered not from some psychotic disorder but rather an overinflated sense of importance and a belief that he is the smartest person in every room.
“He has a sense of entitlement, he takes advantage of others, he lacks empathy, and he’s arrogant,” she said.
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