We've only just begun to see the unraveling of the strange case of the Zizians, as we'll call them for now, a purported "death cult" with links to the rationalist movement, whose alleged activities the last two years have led to a total of six deaths to date.

It appears to be a small group, highly educated, computer savvy, at times geographically scattered, and a number of them if not all of them appear to identify as trans or nonbinary — with their deadnames potentially being publicized widely as law enforcement releases information about the cases, as these are still their legal names. If we can call them a cult at all, they aren't the type who all lived together on a compound for extended periods — though if they had a compound, it was a pair of box trucks parked for three years on Curtis Lind's property on Lemon Street in Vallejo, a cul de sac in an industrial part of town.

Neighbors had seen the individuals walking around outside with gas masks, and they'd been seen walking in the nude as well. Otherwise they would be clad in black, and they'd been nicknamed "The Cult."

It's since come to light that they are all vegan, highly intellectual, concerned with the rise of artificial intelligence, and they were linked to a creepy protest action in Solano County in 2019 outside a retreat hosted by the Berkeley-based Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) — with whom they, or at least the group's purported leader, has some previous ties.

Lind was killed earlier this month at age 82, three months before he was set to testify in the trial of two people who had allegedly attacked him with knives and a samurai sword in November 2022, causing him to lose an eye.

An Attack Spurred By a Threatened Eviction
The first of a series of deaths took place the night Lind was attacked. 31-year-old Emma Borhanian was fatally shot by Lind as he defended himself against three individuals — two other members of the group, Alexander "Somni" Leatham and Suri Dao, have been in custody ever since for Borhanian's murder, and the attempted murder of Lind. According to investigators, the trio lured Lind out of his trailer one night telling him there was a water leak, and they had planned to kill and dismember him and dissolve his body in a vat of chemicals that was already prepared.

It's unclear if they also had plans to dispose of a witness on the property, another octogenarian who lived in a separate trailer, Patrick McMillan, who saw his friend Lind impaled through the chest with the sword. McMillan is now the sole surviving witness, though he was not an eyewitness to the initial attack.

McMillan told the media at the time that the group had discovered that Lind had called in the sheriff to evict them, after they had stopped paying rent on the property three years earlier — they were able to remain in part due to a pandemic eviction moratorium.

Leatham and Dao have both repeatedly tried to escape custody, according to the county district attorney. Both are set to stand trial in April.

An arrest was made soon after Lind's killing on January 17, and 22-year-old Maximillian Snyder is now in custody in Solano County. As the Chronicle reports, Snyder made his first court appearance on Tuesday, calmly answering questions from the judge.

A LinkedIn account that appears to belong to Snyder shows that he scored a 1570 on his SAT, and that he has a degree from Oxford, as of last year in Computer Science and Philosophy. He lists himself as a private tutor and as "lead author" of "commissioned articles on optimized [Dungeons & Dragons] character builds and advice on a range of roleplaying topics."

There were apparently multiple witnesses to the final attack on Lind. Workers at a nearby auto body shop had seen a strange, long-haired figure resembling Snyder skulking about Lemon Street for days leading up to the stabbing, as the Chronicle explains. And then on January 17, that figure allegedly ran up to the 82-year-old Lind, put an arm around his neck, and began stabbing him in the chest. After running away, witnesses say, the suspect returned to slash Lind's throat, to make sure he did not survive this time.

The 'Zizians'
Dao and Leatham, along with Gwen Danielson, were among the four individuals arrested in the 2019 Sonoma County protest incident — in which they donned capes and Guy Fawkes masks and seemed vaguely menacing. Also with them was Jack "Ziz" LaSota, who some have indicated is a leader of this group. LaSota, who appears to use either she/her or they/them pronouns, might be in custody in Pennsylvania (more on that below) though her wherabouts are unclear; but OpenVallejo reported that LaSota had previously been living at the Lemon Street compound with the three others who allegedly attacked Lind.

Following the Sonoma County incident, the four individuals sued the county over treatment during their detention that they described as "torture," and their legal complaint mentioned one of them being mocked for their trans identity.

It's unclear what the group was up to, but a friend of Lind's who helped clean up the property after the November 2022 attack described finding surgical and medical equipment — including an ultrasound machine — in the box trucks that belonged to them, as well as dozens of laptop computers.

Online chatter about the group has referred to individuals who were "fans of Ziz," and while we don't yet have evidence that this is a cult being led by one individual, the collective term "Zizians" has been used by others to describe them.

As the UK Independent reports, the name has been used by individuals in multiple online forums to refer to the group, which has been called a "murder gang" and a radical offshoot of the rationalist movement.

A source with Berkeley ties further told OpenVallejo that the Zizians believe that individuals can split their consciousness between two hemispheres of their brain, or two personalities, waking one side at a time.

The online forum LessWrong has a thread with a warning about Ziz that dates back to February 2023.

"Some people in the rationalist community are concerned about risks of physical violence from Ziz and some of her associates," the post begins. "Over the past few years, Ziz has repeatedly called for the deaths of many different classes of people."

The post adds that Ziz and Danielson may have both faked their own deaths in mid-2022.

A separate blog that seems to lay out an alleged history of Ziz and the Zizians describes Ziz as a frustrated researcher into AI risk who had hopes of assembling a group of like-minded individuals to "live on boats" in the Bay Area — in order to avoid paying high rents, but "still have access to the Bay Area network." This didn't work out, and "Her posts become progressively more bitter over time."

The box truck encampment on Lind's property may have been some sort of Plan B.

Also, Ziz, and by extension her followers, apparently believe in a radical form of veganism in which meat-eaters deserve to be punished — and they hold a belief that animals are of equal moral worth to humans. As the Chronicle reports, in one of several letters to the judge in her case, Leatham questioned prosecutors who referred to her delusions about meat-eaters, saying, "Is it my belief that financially supporting death camps and consuming the corpses of their victims is wrong and those who do so are monsters?"

And most unsettlingly, the blog writer explains, "Zizians do not think it is ever valid to surrender. The reasoning goes that if someone is trying to extract a surrender from you, giving in is choosing a strategy that gets coerced into surrender."

The post, which dates to sometime between the 2019 Sonoma County protest and the 2022 incident on Lind's property, suggests that Ziz targets people with trans identities for indoctrination into her sphere/cult. "All four of the people arrested as part of Ziz's protest were transgender women... This is far from coincidence as Ziz seems to go out of her way to target transgender people. In terms of cult indoctrination such folks are an excellent fit," the writer says, noting that trans people are often financial vulnerable and already in the process of creating a new identity, which can then be undermined.

The Zizian way of thinking, this writer suggests, is that each hemisphere of the brain has a different gender, and that everyone can be bigender, and "This provides a convenient basis for her to undermine the identity of people she's recruiting."

"Doing a quick count there's at least 9 folks in her orbit who endorse her ideas and keep mutual friendships," the post continues. "The purpose of this document is to warn you not to join them! Ziz is a master manipulator; she is extremely skilled at selling people on nonsense ideas about decision theory and ethics that defy not just the 'rules of rationality' but basic common sense."

A Double Murder in Pennsylvania
Another figure in this group was just identified by the media in the last couple of days, Michelle Zajko, whose name is on ownership records for a piece of property in the very remote Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. The box trucks that were left behind on Lind's property in Vallejo were registered in Vermont, possibly by Zajko, and as VTDigger reports, she has now been linked to the purchase of weapons, including a handgun that was used to kill a border patrol officer in Vermont last week.

Back in January 2023, or on December 31, 2022, just about six weeks after the violence in Vallejo, Zajko's parents, Richard and Rita Zajko, were fatally shot in their Chester Heights, Pennsylvania home. A possible motive for the killing has not been publicized, but authorities quickly determined it was likely a double homicide, and Ziz was reportedly detained in connection with the crime — although I have yet to see an online record of this arrest.

Zajko has been linked online to this X account which went quiet as of December 2022, but which had previously been used to express frustration about Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter, and about the treatment of trans people by the government.

"We are all already dead, and we can die giving death & its servants what they want, or we can die fighting, and fighting is the only option with a chance of victory," one tweet on the account reads.

Box Trucks and Airbnbs In North Carolina
21-year-old Teresa Youngblut, who is now in federal custody in Vermont, is linked to Snyder through a marriage license application from last fall in Washington State — both she and Snyder appear to have attended school there, and both now seem to be in the Zizian orbit.

Youngblut and a German national with the legal name Felix Baukholt, who went by Ophelia, were reportedly staying for an extended period of time in two separate townhouses in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Baukholt arrived in July 2023, and had been staying there over a year and a half, while Youngblut arrived in November 2024 — shortly after the marriage license application — and paid $10,000 to the Airbnb host to extend her stay through March.

The owner of the property tells the Associated Press that Baukholt had a box truck parked outside their unit with power cables running out to it. "There would be times when I would come to get the trash and as I’m coming up the driveway, he’d [sic] be crawling out of the cab [of the truck]," the owner said.

The owner said that a third figure, who appeared male, was also seen on the property. And, "They were always wearing black and in the back of my mind, this entire time, I’m just thinking, 'What is going on with these people?'"

He added that the hairs on the back of his neck stood up when he went into Youngblut's unit last week to check on a plumbing issue, and "The thing that struck me the most was that there was a stretcher in the living room."

Two Killed, Including Border Agent in Vermont Confrontation
As we discussed yesterday, Youngblut was arrested last week following a deadly January 20 confrontation with a border patrol agent in Coventry, Vermont. Coventry is next door to the town of Derby, which is where Zajko purchased land in 2021 for a reported $10,000, per VTDigger.

Youngblut was driving a Prius registered to Baukholt when the pair were pulled over by border control — and authorities had apparently been keeping tabs on them for about a week, after they'd been spotted in town wearing tactical gear. Youngblut allegedly pulled her weapon and fired on border agent David Maland, 44, killing him. Baukholt also allegedly reached for a weapon and was fatally shot, while Youngblut was shot and wounded.

The incident certainly reflects an attitude of avoiding "surrender" at all costs.

The Independent reports that authorities found 48 rounds of ammunition in the car, as well as shooting targets. Youngblut's journal was also recovered, which contained evidence of frequent recent LSD trips.

Zajko has been named a person of interest in this case, and reportedly was the one who purchased the weapon used to killed Maland.

According to a court filing obtained by VTDigger, both Zajko and Youngblut "are acquainted with and have been in frequent contact with an individual who was detained by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania during [the Zajko] homicide investigation; that individual is also a person of interest in a homicide investigation in Vallejo, California." That person of interest appears to be Snyder.

Previously: Two Linked to Alleged Vallejo Vegan Cult With Violent History Arrested For Murders In Vermont and Vallejo