A jury has convicted Jason Eaton for the shooting of three Palestinian college students outside his Burlington apartment, rejecting his insanity defense. 

Eaton has confessed to the November 25, 2023 attack, which injured Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ali Ahmad and partially paralyzed Hisham Awartani. But his attorneys contended that he was legally insane at the time, suffering from severe psychotic delusions. 

Jurors were swift in their verdict. They deliberated 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.  

The verdict capped a six-day trial during which jurors heard conflicting expert testimony on the question of whether Eaton suffered from a severe mental illness that could result in the break from reality he described before the attack.

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 were intending to harm a Jewish family in his neighborhood that he’d been watching over, testimony showed. 

The three young men were in fact visiting Burlington to visit 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 stormed into southern Israel in a surprise attack, attracted worldwide attention.  

This post will be updated.

Colin Flanders is a staff writer at Seven Days, covering health care, cops and courts. He has won three first-place awards from the Association of Alternative Newsmedia, including Best News Story for “Vermont’s Relapse,” a portrait of the state’s…
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