Families of Palestinian students who were shot thought they’d be safer in the U.S.

The families of the three Palestinian students who were shot in Vermont say the senseless violence came as a shock.

Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ali Ahmad were walking on a residential street in Burlington near the University of Vermont on Saturday night when they were shot, according to local police. The longtime friends grew up in Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, and came to the U.S. for college.

Awartani and Abdalhamid are American citizens, and Ali Ahmad is studying on a student visa, a former teacher in Ramallah told The Associated Press.

The three 20-year-olds had been speaking a mix of Arabic and English before they were shot, police said, and two of them were wearing keffiyehs, a traditional Palestinian scarf. A suspect, Jason James Eaton, was arrested Sunday; he has pleaded not guilty to three counts of attempted murder in the second degree.

Radi Tamimi, Abdalhamid’s uncle, said on “The Rachel Maddow Show” on Monday night that the student’s family thought he’d be safer pursuing his education in the U.S. than in the West Bank.

“For him to be violently attacked here in a small town in Vermont is really quite shocking,” he said.

Awartani’s mother, Elizabeth Price, told NPR that family members didn’t want the Brown University student to go back home to Ramallah during the Christmas break.

“My husband didn’t want Hisham to come back for Christmas,” Price said. “He thought our son would be safer [in the U.S.] than in Palestine.”

Awartani, whose spine was injured, faces a long road to recovery, his uncle Rich Price told NBC News. Ali Ahmad is dealing with significant pain, while Abdalhamid is expected to make a full recovery, he added.

In a statement, read Monday night at a vigil on Brown’s campus in Rhode Island, Awartani said he was “but one casualty in this much wider conflict” and added: “Had I been shot in the West Bank, where I grew up, the medical services that saved my life here would likely have been withheld by the Israeli army.”

Rania Ma’ayeh, head of the Ramallah Friends School, told AP that Awartani is studying mathematics and archaeology at Brown; Abdalhamid is a pre-med student at Haverford College in Pennsylvania; and Ali Ahmad is studying mathematics and information technology at Trinity College in Connecticut.

As the Justice Department and authorities in Vermont investigate the shooting as a possible hate crime, the students’ families released a statement saying that “racist and dehumanizing” rhetoric about the Israel-Hamas war had contributed to “an environment of heightened racism and violence towards Palestinians and Arabs.”

Tamimi told Maddow: “I think it speaks really directly to the climate that we’re seeing and the language being used in particular towards Palestinians. ... I think this has opened the door to something like this happening, and we’re seeing the effects. And I personally believe it wasn’t a matter of if, but really when something like this was going to occur.”