Jason Eaton, the man accused of shooting three Palestinian students in Burlington in 2023, claimed without evidence during a court hearing on Friday that he had been acting under the instruction of the Central Intelligence Agency and Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency.
He said during the hearing that the three victims were associated with Hamas, and suggested he would pursue a public authority defense in his case because of his claimed ties to the CIA.
Eaton’s comments came during a court hearing to review motions he filed to gain access to the victims’ cellphone data, which Burlington police collected from them with their consent in the hours after their shooting. His motion also sought access to a Homeland Security document compiled after the incident.
Reviewing the victims’ cellphone data, he said, could help bolster his defense. He later asked Superior Court Judge John Pacht for permission to hire the head of defense at Palantir Technologies to review the data and brief the court on their findings.
Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George suggested during the court hearing that Eaton’s comments in court provide some evidence for a hate crime enhancement.
“I do not believe this has any credibility at all,” George said of Eaton’s comments. “In fact, I think it is providing greater context than we’ve had for a possible hate crime enhancement.”
Eaton was deemed competent to stand trial in the fall. But on Friday, his defense attorney, Peggy Jansch, of the Chittenden County Public Defender’s Office, asked the court to order an updated competency hearing, citing his comments in court.
Eaton’s comments offer some insight into his defense strategy, and shed some light into his state of mind when he allegedly shot Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Aliahmad on Nov. 25, 2023.
The three students, all 20 years old at the time, were in town visiting one of their families for Thanksgiving. They were walking on North Prospect Street, speaking a mix of Arabic and English and wearing kaffiyehs, a traditional scarf that is a symbol of Palestinian identity, when Eaton approached them from a nearby porch and allegedly shot all three.
He has pleaded not guilty to three counts of attempted second-degree murder charges, and has been held without bail at the Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans since his arrest soon after the shooting.
His comments Friday prompted backlash from the victims’ attorney, William Clark, who said his clients were moving forward with a protective order to prevent access to their data.
“I’m not letting my victims be harassed under a completely frivolous theory of defense that does not even have an ethical ground to be able to be raised in court, regardless of its legal infirmity,” Clark said.
“It’s pure harassment if they go forward with a deposition that’s asking about some of the allegations you’ve heard today.”
George has said previously that a hate crime enhancement against Eaton was unlikely, and that she did not have enough evidence to support such a charge.
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