Vermont man on trial claims CIA told him to shoot three Palestinian students
FILE-Judge gavel, scales of justice and law books in court. (Brian A. Jackson/South Florida Sun Sentinel/Getty Images)
A man is on trial for shooting three Palestinian college students in Burlington, Vermont in 2023. Jason Eaton, now 51, alleges he was acting on orders from the CIA and Mossad when he shot the students who were walking past his home days after Thanksgiving that year.
According to The Associated Press, Eaton said the United States and Israeli intelligence agencies transmitted the messages to him via FM radio and that God was ordering him to protect his Jewish neighbors.
Eaton’s allegations were at the center of his insanity defense as he went on trial for attempted murder charges on Monday. He has pleaded not guilty but doesn't dispute that he was the shooter.
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If convicted, Eaton faces up to life in prison. But if he’s found not guilty by reason of insanity, he could be ordered to undergo mental health treatment.
Hisham Awartani, Tahseen Aliahmad and Kinnan Abdalhamid who were shot by Eaton grew up in the West Bank and became friends as classmates in Ramallah before moving to the United States for college, the AP noted.
Awartani, Aliahmad and Abdalhamid, all of whom are now 23, testified one after another as Eaton watched from the defense table in a Vermont courtroom.
The AP reported that prosecutor Sally Adams told jurors that a state psychiatrist who is scheduled to testify concluded that Eaton did not have a mental disease or defect.
Police discovered three shotguns in Eaton's apartment and a Ruger .380-caliber gun that crime lab testing determined was the gun used in the shooting, Adams stated. Eaton bought the gun seven months earlier from a Vermont gun store.
What happened in the shooting of the Palestinian students?
The backstory:
In November 2023, Hisham Awartani, Tahseen Aliahmad and Kinnan Abdalhamid, who were all 20 years old at the time, made a holiday weekend visit to Awartani’s grandmother's house, a trip to a bowling alley to celebrate his twin cousins' birthday, and they took a walk near the University of Vermont.
Awartani, who was studying at Brown University in Rhode Island at the time, told jurors during the trial Monday that the three men were smoking cigarettes and speaking a mix of English and Arabic.
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The Associated Press reported that two of the men said they were wearing traditional Palestinian scarves called keffiyehs. Awartani said he first noticed Jason Eaton standing on a porch as they approached the apartment house where he lived.
Awartani said Eaton was off the porch and walking toward the three men. As Eaton got to a few feet away, "he pulled out a handgun and started shooting at us," said Awartani, who was paralyzed from the waist down in the shooting and now uses a wheelchair.
The AP noted that Abdalhamid, a student at Haverford College near Philadelphia, said he escaped and hid behind another home after seeing Aliahmad fall to the ground. Abdalhamid said he only realized later when he sat down that he had also been wounded.
Awartani was shot in the chest and the bullet ricocheted off his scapula, causing paraplegia in his spinal cord. Aliahmad, who was a student at Trinity College in Connecticut, was hit in the collarbone, and Abdalhamid was shot in the butt.
The Source: Information for this story was provided by The Associated Press, which cites comments from the three Palestinian men who testified at the Vermont man’s trial. This story was reported from Washington, D.C.