A 48-year-old Vermont man has been arrested for shooting three Palestinian college students while walking on a street in Burlington on Saturday.
Jason J. Eaton was arrested Sunday in the same general area as the shooting, which took place in front of a building where he lived, the Burlington Free Press reported.
As CrimeOnline reported, the three men, all 20-years-old and lifelong friends, were visiting a relative of one of them for the Thanksgiving holiday. Two of the three are US citizens, and the third is a legal resident, police said. Two of the three were wearing keffiyehs, a traditional Palestinian scarf, and they were speaking Arabic at the time of the attack.
Police said Eaton fired at least four rounds at the young men, without speaking.
Burlington Police said that local, state, and federal law enforcement worked together on the investigation, and the US Attorney for the District of Vermont, Nikolas P. Kerest, said his office and the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division were assessing the evidence to determine if hate crime charges are warranted.
Investigators said they uncovered enough evidence to charge Eaton in a search of his home. He is expected to be arraigned later Monday.
The Ramallah Friends School, a Quaker-run private school in the West Bank that all three men graduated, identified the victims as Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid, and Tahseen Ahmad.
Awartani was a student at Brown University in Rhode Island, Abdalhamid at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, and Ahmad at Trinity College in Connecticut, the three schools confirmed.
Official joint statement from the families of Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ali Ahmad, three Palestinian college students shot in Vermont: pic.twitter.com/FqHUOVR5lZ
— IMEU (@theIMEU) November 26, 2023
The Ramallah School said that Awartani was shot in the back and Ahmad in the chest. Abdalhamid suffered minor injuries.
The families of the men released a statement through the Institute for Middle East Understanding calling on “a thorough investigation” into the shooting and expressing gratitude to medical staff who saved their children’s life and city officials “whar are giving their full attention to this horrific hate crime in the pursuit of justice.”
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[Featured image: Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdel Hamid, and Tahseen Ahmed/Facebook]
