Jason Eaton insisted he was acting on orders from the CIA and Mossad when he shot three Palestinian college students in 2023 in the US.
He said the US and Israeli intelligence agencies transmitted the messages to him via FM radio that he heard on an NPR affiliate and that God was commanding him to protect his Jewish neighbours.
Eaton’s claims were at the heart of his insanity defence as he went on trial Monday on attempted murder charges in a case that shook Burlington, Vermont, and reverberated in the occupied West Bank, where the three wounded men grew up and became friends as schoolmates in Ramallah before moving to the US for college.
But no hate crime charges were filed as questions persisted about whether anti-Palestinian animus, an altered mental state or something else had compelled Eaton to open fire on Hisham Awartani, Tahseen Aliahmad and Kinnan Abdalhamid, who were all 20 at the time.
Two of them said they were wearing traditional Palestinian scarves known as keffiyehs. Awartani said he first noticed Eaton standing on a porch as they approached the apartment house where he lived.
As Eaton got to about five to 10 feet (1.5 to 3 meters) away, “he pulled out a handgun and started shooting at us,” said Awartani, who was paralysed from the waist down in the shooting and now uses a wheelchair.
Aliahmad, who was a student at Trinity College in Connecticut, was struck in the collarbone, and Abdalhamid was shot in the right buttock.
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