Vermont Jury Convicts Eaton of Attempting to Kill 3 Palestinian Students

Was Jason Eaton too psychotic to know what he was doing, or did he know exactly what a pistol does at close range? That was the question a Chittenden County jury answered on September 21, 2026, and its answer was blunt: guilty, three times over. After a six-day trial built almost entirely around mental state — Eaton never disputed that he pulled the trigger — jurors took about two hours to reject legal insanity and convict the 51-year-old Burlington man of three counts of attempted second-degree murder ^{4 5}.

On paper the verdict is simple. Eaton was ordered jailed pending sentencing after convictions that each carry up to life in prison, with a presumptive minimum of 20 years per count. Sentencing has not been scheduled. What the two-hour deliberation settled was criminal responsibility; what it left open is how much prison time finally decides a shooting that has lived in public memory for almost three years as both a local sidewalk crime and a national wound ^{22 5}.

The men Eaton shot were 20-year-old childhood friends from Ramallah in the West Bank who had attended Ramallah Friends School together. Identified in standard spellings as Hisham Awartani of Brown University, Tahseen Aliahmad of Trinity College and Kinnan Abdalhamid of Haverford College, they were visiting Awartani's family and grandmother in Burlington for Thanksgiving weekend. A closing-argument transcript rendered the same three names as Sham Aratany, Tasin Ali Ahmed and Kenan Abdelhamid, variant transcriptions of the same three men ^{22 3}.

They were on a walk on North Prospect Street after dusk, speaking a mix of English and Arabic, with two wearing keffiyehs. Eaton stepped off his porch, approached without speaking and fired a Ruger pistol without warning. The prosecution's physical case was not really contested: matching casings, the pistol recovered from Eaton's apartment, and victim testimony that he opened fire without warning and without a word ^{22 27}.

The human cost centers on lasting bodily harm that no verdict undoes. Awartani was struck in the thumb and in the chest and spine and was paralyzed from the chest down, also described as paralyzed from the waist down, and lives with paraplegia. Aliahmad was struck in the chest. Abdalhamid was struck in the glute while running away. All three survived and testified on the first day of trial on September 14, 2026, and victim mother Elizabeth Price was cited in connection with the paralysis and the verdict ^{1 2 12}.

The trial turned on mental state, and the two sides described different men. Prosecutors argued Eaton acted intentionally, had no mental disease or defect, was not insane and was guilty on all three counts. Forensic psychiatrist Dr. Jhilam Biswas testified for the prosecution on September 17, 2026 that Eaton was legally sane at the time of the shooting and criminally responsible, while agreeing he had mental-health issues. Prosecutors suggested bias without filing hate-crime charges ^{3 14}.

The defense, by public defenders Josh O'Hara and Margaret Jansch, called the events tragic and argued Eaton was legally insane with a psychotic and delusional disorder and lacked capacity to appreciate the criminality of his conduct or to conform his conduct. The defense presented an expert who said Eaton was psychotic, pointed to Eaton hearing voices and to losing his job about two weeks earlier, and played a recorded November 30, 2023 interview in which Eaton claimed government agencies including the CIA and Mossad directed him through FM radio and that God told him to protect Jewish neighbors after October 7 ^{3 15 17}.

Procedure did not give the defense another exit. The judge had previously found Eaton competent to stand trial and during trial denied Eaton's mid-trial attempt to fire his attorneys and represent himself. No hate-crime charges were filed and no additional findings on motive or other charges beyond the three attempted-murder counts were established ^{16 22}.

For the families, the verdict closed three years of sorrow and struggle with a declaration that what happened was attempted murder, not incomprehensible tragedy. Awartani said he felt vindicated and that he was targeted because of who he is and his heritage, an assertion of meaning the criminal counts themselves do not formally decide, since motive was not charged as a separate crime ^{1 22}.

What remains is consequential and unresolved. Eaton sits jailed facing up to life on each count. State's Attorney Sarah George said she will seek input from the families before recommending a sentence, leaving the length of prison time, whether terms run consecutively, and how the court weighs permanent paraplegia and the rejected insanity claim still to be decided ²².