Ziz, aka Jack LaSota, the purported ringleader of a bizarre cult that appears to have grown out of the Bay Area and the rationalist movement, has been found and arrested in Maryland, along with two other figures who were also on the run from the law.
Police in Allegany County, Maryland arrested LaSota, along with 26-year-old Daniel Blank and 32-year-old Michelle Zajko. VTDigger reported on the arrests of LaSota and Zajko, as did the Associated Press. The Chronicle confirms that Blank was also arrested with them.
Allegany County is in a rural, wooded part of Maryland next to the border of Pennsylvania, and includes Rocky Gap State Park and Green Ridge State Forest.
All three were considered persons of interest in the December 31, 2022 double-murder of Zajko's parents, Richard and Rita Zajko, in nearby Pennsylvania. The trio were detained by police in January 2023 at a hotel near the Philadelphia airport — with LaSota feigning, or being in, some sort of trance state — and both LaSota and Blank were held in custody on obstruction charges, with LaSota charged with resisting arrest. LaSota was eventually released on bail five months later and has failed to appear for subsequent court dates.
None of the three has been charged with the homicides, and the Chronicle adds the detail today that Blank provided an alibi for the crime for Zajko.
Zajko was the alleged purchaser of a gun linked to her parents' murder, and the gun subsequently turned up along with other weapons in the possession of two individuals who last month were involved in the alleged killing of a border patrol agent in Vermont, 44-year-old David Maland. 21-year-old Teresa Youngblut remains in custody for that crime, and was shot and injured herself, while 28-year-old German national Ophelia Bauckholt was shot and killed.
Both LaSota and Zajko were considered persons of interest in the border patrol agent's killing. And Zajko was the owner of some property in a rural part of Vermont near the Canadian border, and also near where the shootout occurred on January 20.
LaSota was reportedly living out of two box trucks on a property in Vallejo in or around November 2022 when the landlord on the property, Curtis Lind, was allegedly attacked by three members of this Zizian group who had been residing there for three years at that point. One of those individuals, Emma Borhanian, was shot and killed by Lind, and the other two, Alexander "Somni" Leatham and Suri Dao are in custody in Solano County awaiting trial on attempted murder and murder charges.
Lind, who planned to testify against them, was killed at his property on January 17, just three days before the shooting with the border patrol agent. And Youngblut was linked, via a recent marriage license application, to Maximillian Snyder, the 22-year-old who was arrested in connection with Lind's killing last month.
Authorities have suggested that Youngblut and Bauckholt, who had been living in Airbnb units in Chapel Hill, North Carolina as of late last year, were in possession of cellphones, at least one of which had been in frequent contact with LaSota/Ziz.
According to VTDigger, Zajko and LaSota were being held in Maryland on charges of "obstructing and hindering" officers, as well as trespassing and misdemeanor firearm possession. Lt. Jeremy Stonebraker of the Maryland State Police tells the site, "The investigators that are working on the case aren’t going to do any press releases at this time because the investigation is kind of fluid and ongoing and the FBI is involved now."
It appears that the two (or three) individuals were reported as trespassing, and it was only later that local authorities learned of their connection to the recent Vermont killings, and the Pennsylvania killings.
During the January 2023 arrest, LaSota — who uses she/her pronouns — was found unresponsive lying on a bathroom floor in the Philadelphia airport motel room where the group was located. The state she was in seems connected to a theory she has promoted to her group of followers that has to do with putting one hemisphere of the brain to sleep at a time. LaSota continued to remain in this state during the booking process, and a mugshot photo shows this.
A mugshot photo of Zajko, taken Sunday, posted to VT Digger and provided by the Allegany County Sheriff's Office, shows Zajko apparently in a similar state, with her eyes rolled into the back of her head.
These arrests bring to a close the uncertain period that began several weeks ago, with some of those acquainted with Ziz wondering whether other killings could still be to come. Some have expressed fears online that the group would continue to act out violently, under a belief system that didn't seem concerned with laws, morality, or civil society — but was deeply concerned with consuming animal products, and the bases of gender identities.
The only at-large figure who is known to have had connections with this group is Gwen Danielson, who was rumored to have taken her own life in 2022, but that has not been confirmed. [Update: She has been off the grid, and in contact with her father.] Danielson, Leatham, LaSota, and Borhanian were all arrested in connection with a November 2019 protest outside a rationalist group event in Sonoma County, but those charges were subsequently dropped.
LaSota allegedly faked her own death, via drowning in San Francisco Bay, in August 2022, only to turn up alive several months later in Solano County.
Last week, we heard from Snyder that he was not a "friend" of Ziz, and he instead issued a statement via a letter to a rationalist movement figure about the importance of becoming vegan.
As the Chronicle reported, the last known public contact they could find from Ziz was a comment reply on her blog, in which she asked the reader if they were vegan, saying, "Do you consume the flesh of the innocent?" And the paper now also reports that they spoke to Daniel Blank's father, who said he had not heard from his son since the spring of 2023, when he and his wife received a one-line text message from their son with a video about farm animals, saying, "Look what you have done."
This post has been updated with confirmation about Blank's arrest.
