It may not get us any further in understanding actual motive in the case of a January murder in Vallejo, but we now have an extended statement from the suspect in the case.
The 22-year-old man accused of slitting the throat of a 82-year-old Vallejo man who had been the landlord of several members of a rationalist splinter group that has recently gained attention as a possible cult won't admit his links to the group, and seems to want to distance himself from them. But he had a long message to deliver to one of the recognized leaders of the rationalist community about the moral necessity of a vegan lifestyle.
In a lengthy letter dictated to a journalist last week, we get the first clues into the motivations of Maximillian Snyder, who was arrested shortly after the January 17 killing of Curtis Lind. Witnesses described seeing Snyder, dressed in black, lurking on the cul de sac where Lind lived for days before the attack. And one day after the district attorney made a statement about Lind's upcoming testimony in a trial stemming from a previous attack on him by alleged cult members, Snyder allegedly stabbed and killed him.
Lind had previously been stabbed, and impaled with a sword, in November 2022, when three individuals who have been associated with the "Zizians," who had been living on his property in box trucks, rent-free, for two years, allegedly attacked him. Lind had a gun and fatally shot one of the attackers, 31-year-old Emma Borhanian. The other two suspects, Alexander "Somni" Leatham and Suri Dao, remain in jail in Solano County charged with the attempted murder of Lind and the murder of Borhanian.
Leatham and Borhanian had previously been arrested in the fall of 2019 in Sonoma County along with two others, Jack "Ziz" LaSota and Gwen Danielson, for protesting outside of an event hosted by the Berkeley-based Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) — one of a couple of organizations that are part of the rationalist sphere in the Bay Area, and which figure heavily in the online writings of LaSota, Danielson, and Leatham.
The letter that Snyder dictated to the Chronicle from jail was addressed to Eliezer Yudkowsky, a figure who also comes up often in the group's writings, who co-founded the Berkeley-based Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI). And while Snyder claims in the letter not to be a "friend" of Ziz, Snyder seems deeply interested in getting Yudkowsky, and by extension others in the rationalist community, to listen to him — and he speaks in the same verbose, intense, moralistic manner that is found in the writings of Ziz/LaSota, Danielson, and others in the group.
It is the writing of a highly intelligent, arguably mentally unhinged, and very passionate person.
"First: I am not one of Ziz’s friends, and neither she nor her friends endorse me or my words so far as I know. I speak only for myself, as myself, for the sake of everyone. This I swear on my Laws," Snyder begins.
The declaration is notable if only because Snyder had no previous, physical connection, as far as we know, to Lind's property, however Ziz and several of the others in the group lived there until the attack on Lind in 2022. So Snyder's reasons for seeking out or harming Lind, who was the only eyewitness who could help convict Leatham and Dao, would logically seem linked.
As the Seattle Times reports, Snyder's mother, who lives in Germany, had lost contact with her son last month, and asked police to check on him at the condo she owns in the Seattle area. He was not there, and he'd been arrested in Solano County by the time police got there.
Ziz appears to be invested in getting Leatham and Dao out of jail, though there have been no accounts of Ziz being in the Bay Area for at least two years. (Ziz appears to have faked her own death, an August 2022 drowning in the Bay, before being seen alive by Solano County authorities months later, and then getting arrested in Pennsylvania after that.) Both Leatham and Dao have attempted to escape several times, authorities say. And the Chronicle reports that Ziz has been recorded in one jail phone call encouraging Dao to escape.
According to the Chronicle, Snyder refused to answer any questions about his motivations, or whether he was following instructions from anyone else to kill Lind.
His priority, instead, was to address Yudkowsky and vehemently encourage him to stop consuming animals and animal products.
"Eliezer, you need to have a crisis of faith about whether animals are people. It is critical to saving the world," Synder writes. "I am one of your students, and I am desperately trying to reach out to you, not to ask for your help, but because it’s the best gamble I can think of to increase the chance that this world survives, with what little power I have left."
Snyder says that while he and Yudkowsky have not directly met, he considers himself a "student" of Yudkowsky's writings. And the two may have interacted once online. "You can find me in your DMs and in Eliezerfic as Audere," Snyder writes, "I talked with you about a cool impossibility proof that I came up with, and you advised me not to let academic types push me toward obscuring its simplicity. It ended up winning an AI Alignment Award prize."
Snyder continues, "First, animals being people has obvious, pervasive implications about the world, the current strategic situation, and humanity. You could have been much more pessimistic about humanity much sooner and avoided starting the AI arms race, for example."
He says of animals, "Those are my little brothers and sisters and siblings. They’re yours too, and they’ve been fighting all this time, over generation upon generation, death upon death upon death, so that one day, maybe, someone might grow up enough to save their children’s children’s children’s children."
It seems clear from the writing that Snyder believes Yudkowsky has some outsized influence on culture, human thought, or the world at large. And by getting through to him about the importance of living a plant-based lifestyle, he will "save the world."
"I was not quick to go vegan," Snyder writes. "It wasn’t hard for me to realize that even a small chance that I might be wrong about eating animals was important. But then I fought a rear guard retreat against the truth."
Yudkowsky, for his part, tells the Chronicle that he refuses to read the letter on principle. "Audience should not be a reward for crime," he tells the paper, adding that he gets people asking him to read their writings all the time. "I am usually too busy and too tired and cannot engage with them," Yudkowsky says. "It would be a slap in their faces to first read the work of a criminal."
Despite the many mentions of MIRI and CFAR and rationalism in connection with this story of an alleged murder cult making national headlines, Yudkowsky does not appear to have publicly acknowledged it at all in his very active presence on X the last two weeks.
Yudkowsky's name, and that of CFAR president and co-founder Anna Salamon, come up frequently in the Zizians' writings, which also focus heavily on trans identity, "cissexism," and accusations of rape and sexual assault among people in the rationalist community. And there seems to have been a fair amount of thinking and debate within the community about transness itself in recent years, vis a vis how the brain functions, which was a motivating factor in many of these writings.
Snyder stands out among the people identified so far as "Zizians" for using he/him pronouns and appearing to be cisgendered. Snyder was linked, via a November 2024 marriage license, to 21-year-old Teresa Youngblut, who was arrested in Vermont on January 20 after allegedly fatally shooting a border patrol agent.
Youngblut was indicted Thursday by a federal grand jury for the killing of that agent, David "Chris" Maland. She had been hospitalized for injuries she sustained in a shootout with Maland and his partner. Also killed in the exchange of gunfire was German national Ophelia Bauckholt, age 28.
Bauckholt and Youngblut had been living in Airbnbs in Chapel Hill, North Carolina for a period of months leading up to the Vermont incident. Sources have suggested that Ziz may have been spotted there as well — but otherwise authorities do not know the current whereabouts of Ziz, though they've suggested Youngblut and Bauckholt may have been in cellphone contact with her.
"There are a lot of young people... who would have had OK lives except they bumped into the network around LaSota," says Salamon, speaking to NBC News about the case.
Snyder, Youngblut, Leatham, and Dao all face life sentences or worse if convicted. LaSota/Ziz, a person named Daniel Blank, and Michelle Zajko all remain free as uncharged persons of interest in the December 31, 2022 murders of Zajko's parents at their home outside Philadelphia. Arrests could be imminent, as guns connected to the Zajko murders were found in Youngblut's possession in Vermont.
