One of three Palestinian college students in Vermont who was shot over Thanksgiving weekend by a local man who allegedly opened fire without a word, says he believes the suspect was “aiming to kill.”
In an appearance on ABC’s The View just four days after he was released from the hospital, 20-year-old Kinnan Abdalhamid described the Nov. 25 attack as “surreal.”
“[E]ven at the moment, it was kind of moving in a nightmare,” Abdalhamid said Thursday. “The way I perceived it wasn’t the same as perceiving anything else in my life. It really felt like I was in a living nightmare.”
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Abdalhamid was walking down a sidewalk in Burlington with two friends, Hisham Awartani and Tahseen Ahmed, speaking a mixture of Arabic and English, when Jason Eaton, 48, suddenly opened fire on the trio, he told the hosts.
“On the way back from the walk on the other side of the sidewalk, the same street as Hisham’s grandmother’s house, in front of us, on the same side, we see this man standing on the porch of his house, kind of looking away from us,” Abdalhamid said. “... He didn’t hesitate without a word to just run down the stairs of the porch, pull out a pistol, and start shooting.”
Awartani and Ahmed, also 20 and of Palestinian descent, were wearing keffiyeh, a traditional Palestinian scarf, but Abdalhamid was not, he explained. However, he had been wearing one the day before, he noted.
“It was almost surreal how quickly he did it,” Abdalhamid said.
Tahseen was shot first, and landed with a “thud on the ground,” according to Abdalhamid.
“That was kind of my signal to make a run for it,” he said, adding that he heard a second shot and another thud “a split-second later.”
“Now I know it’s Hisham hitting the ground,” Abdalhamid went on. “Then I jumped the fence across the street of a random house. I hid behind [in] their backyard for about a minute, fully convinced that both my friends were dead because they were shot point-blank. And he seemed like he was aiming to kill, so I thought that he might have shot them again.”
Abdalhamid thinks he was shot while running away, and didn’t realize he had been hit until he knocked on a neighbor’s door to get them to call police.
His family sent Abdalhamid to study in the U.S. because they thought it would be safer for him than the West Bank, his uncle said earlier this week.
Adbalhamid’s mom, who appeared with him on Thursday’s show, said, “It’s hard to make sense of this… [A]t this time, quite honestly, I feel like no Palestinian is safe anywhere. So it’s really frightening. It’s really traumatizing.”
Eaton, who had a shotgun confiscated by police in 2013 after a girlfriend accused him of domestic violence, has struggled with depression in the past, his mother told The Daily Beast.
“Jason has had a lot of struggles in his life but he is such a kind and loving person,” she said on Monday. “I am just shocked by the whole thing.”
