It feels like there are still shoes to drop in the strange case of the Zizians, whose troubling beliefs and alleged pattern of extreme violence came to light in just the last several days. And now we learn that several key figures in the group are still at large, considered "persons of interest" and wanted for questioning in several murders, and potentially plotting future acts.
Michelle 'Jamie' Zajko
The FBI has now released a photo (seen above) of 32-year-old Michelle "Jamie" Zajko, and a manhunt is reportedly underway for her in mutliple states. Zajko is known to be the owner of a piece of property, purchased for a reported $10,000 in 2021, in a remote corner of Vermont, in the down of Derby, about five miles from the Canadian border. This is very near where, last week, 21-year-old Teresa Youngblut and Felix "Ophelia" Bauckholt (~age 25) were in a shootout with border patrol agents in Coventry, Vermont — a shootout in which Youngblut allegedly killed an agent, David Maland, and was injured herself, and Bauckholt was killed.
Zajko has been a person of interest in the death of her parents, Richard Zajko, 72, and Rita Zajko, 69, on or around December 31, 2022. And, as VTDigger reported, she was the purchaser of weapons in Rutland County, Vermont, one of which was the gun allegedly used by Youngblut to shot Maland. And on the gun registration, Zajko reportedly listed an Orleans, Vermont address — Orleans is several miles south of Derby, also near the Canadian border.
A manhunt is reportedly underway for Zajko by law enforcement in several states, and the FBI has warned that she should be considered "armed and extremely dangerous."
It's unclear if Zajko has ever had any direct ties to the Bay Area. But a clue emerged earlier this week that could connect her to the deaths of Zizian member Emma Borhanian in November 2022, and the January 2025 killing of Curtis Lind, both in Vallejo. Box trucks that belonged to the group, that were parked for three years on Lind's property, were registered in Vermont.
This timeline of events surrounding the Zizians suggests that Zajko was threatened by the group leader Ziz around February 2022 — with Ziz allegedly threatening to kill Zajko if she did not kill her own girlfriend, not identified by name, and then provide proof of it. The timeline also suggests that Zajko's parents were killed in order to gain her inheritance, estimated in the millions of dollars.
As the Newport (Vermont) Dispatch reports, authorities believe Zajko may be driving a green 2013 Subaru Outback with an expired Vermont registration.
Jack 'Ziz' LaSota
The whereabouts of Jack "Ziz" LaSota, the reported ideological driving force behind a small offshoot of rationalist thinkers partly based in the Bay Area, has unclear since the first threads of this story began coming together earlier this week. We learned that Ziz/LaSota, who uses she/her pronouns, faked her own death with the help of two followers in August 2022, only to be discovered alive by authorities three months later amid a murder investigation in Solano County, and then detained in a murder investigation in Delaware County, Pennsylvania less than two months after that.
As the Chronicle is now is reporting, LaSota did not exactly go willingly when the authorities descended on a motel room in Chester, Pennsylvania in January 2023. While another person sharing the motel room, Daniel Blank, followed police commands and exited with hands behind his back, LaSota lay motionless on the bathroom floor.
"He had his eyes closed," a Pennsylvania state trooper reportedly testified, using male pronouns. "He would not speak. He was just laying almost unconscious or as if he was dead on the ground. … He had to be carried out."
Ultimately, Ziz was briefly jailed and charged with misdemeanor obstruction and disorderly conduct, but was freed on bail in June 2023 and soon stopped showing up for court dates. She is at large, and there is a warrant for her arrest in Pennsylvania, with the case still pending.
It seems possible that Ziz is the person referred to by investigators as a "person of interest" in cases in California and Pennsylvania who had been in frequent contact with Youngblut and Bauckholt before the January 20 shootout in Vermont.
The Chronicle's reporting adds a few fresh details to the story of Ziz and her rise to infamy in the larger Rationalist community in the Bay Area. She is the child of an AI researcher at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She was reportedly living as an "anchor-out" on a boat in Half Moon Bay when she first met Curtis Lind, around 2018 or 2019.
A blog written by Ziz called Sinceriously throughout the year 2019, which contains dozens of extremely long long-reads dealing with philosophical issues, gender theory, transness, technology, morality, and much more, has since gone offline but has been archived. It appears to have been a pivotal tool in attracting friends and followers, and contains her theories about the division of the human brain into hemispheres that each may have a different gender, and that "often desire to kill each other."
"Reaching peace between hemispheres with conflicting interests is a tricky process of repeatedly reconstructing frames of game theory and decision theory in light of realizations of them having been strategically damaged by your headmate," Ziz writes.
She also writes, painfully and at length, about withdrawing from her family as a teenager, coming out as trans, feeling her own genitalia as "alien parasites," and avoiding sex and most physical contact because of deep-held feelings and anxieties about sex, consent, orientation, and gender writ large.
More example text: "I’ve got a strong impulse to self-immolate rather than have sex after having my values forcibly modified by some hypothetical collective decision like that, lending moral legitimacy by allowing the civilization that did that, the ability to say, 'look things aren’t that bad you’re enjoying it'."
Ziz reportedly attended a conference or workshop at the Berkeley-based Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) around 2019, but soon had disagreements with members of that community. Ziz and associate Gwen Danielson — who also may have faked her own death, and whose whereabouts are unknown — were reportedly banned from the alumni gathering in Sonoma County in 2019, out of a fear of violence, which they then decided to protest. They protested, in cloaks and Guy Fawkes masks, along with two others, Alexander "Somni" Leatham and Borhanian, and were then arrested.
Fliers they distributed at the protest also referred to another group, MIRI (Machine Intelligence Research Institute), saying that "MIRI missed the rapidly oncoming global catastrophic threat of fascism," and that the group discriminated against transwomen, likely referring to LaSota and Danielson, despite their "being naturally inclined/gifted in mental tech development."
A failed plan to get a community of like-minded AI risk researchers together to live cheaply on boats appears to have led to an offer by Lind to park trailers or other vehicles on his property in Vallejo. This would prove a fatal mistake — Lind was first stabbed multiple times and lost an eye in November 2022 in an attack spurred by an eviction threat — the same attack in which he would fatally shoot Borhanian. And then on January 17, he was fatally stabbed.
22-year-old Maximilian Snyder is being held for that killing in Solano County, and made his first court appearance on Tuesday.
Daniel Blank
We haven't yet seen any photos of Blank, who was detained alongside Ziz in Pennsylvania two years ago, and does not appear to have been charged with anything.
This timeline suggests that Blank may be dead, though that has not been confirmed. And because of the motel situation and association with Ziz and Zajko, it would seem that Blank must still be a person of interest in the deaths of Zajko's parents.
