Twenty-year-old Hisham Awartani paralyzed from the chest down after a bullet lodged in his spine, his family say
One of the three college students of Palestinian descent who were shot in Vermont last month is paralyzed from the chest down after a bullet lodged in his spine, the student’s family said.
Hisham Awartani, a 20-year-old student at Brown University who grew up in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, was walking with two friends near the University of Vermont campus in Burlington on 25 November when, police say, 48-year-old Jason Eaton shot them with a handgun in a suspected hate crime. Eaton has pleaded not guilty.
All I can say is that it’s good to hear that none of the three of them will lose their lives because of this, but how horrible to be paralyzed at 20. Bad enough at any age, but his life was just starting.
And he’d got into an Ivy league university, too.
Just tragic. As I said, the only bright spot is they all survived. But at such a cost.