The three individuals tied to a cult-like group that has been linked to two Bay Area deaths and four on the East Coast were apparently up to their old tricks in rural Maryland when they were arrested on Sunday.

We now know more about the circumstances in which 34-year-old Jack "Ziz" LaSota (she/her), 32-year-old Michelle Zajko, and 26-year-old Daniel Blank were arrested in Allegany County Maryland, after being on the run for nearly two years. And much like they and others in the group did on other people's property in Vallejo, California and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, they were apparently residing in two box trucks, likely tricked out with solar power.

As the Guardian reports, following a Tuesday bail hearing in Maryland, prosecutors say that LaSota, Zajko, and Blank had arrived on a man's property in Frostburg, in Georges Creek Valley, Maryland in recent weeks, and asked permission to camp there for a month. The man reportedly called authorities and said that the trio, who dressed in black and carried holstered guns, seemed suspicious and he wanted them off his property.

The three were arrested and charged with trespassing and gun possession, and authorities did not initially appear to know the links between them and several other violent crimes, including the January 17 murder of Curtis Lind in Vallejo, and the January 20 murder of Border Patrol agent David Maland in Northern Vermont.

All three were also persons of interest in the December 31, 2022 double murder of Zajko's parents in suburban Pennsylvania.

Police said they found a rifle and handgun in one of the box trucks, and Zajko was arrested while carrying a handgun. Zajko also, allegedly, refused to comply with police commands to put her hands behind her back, and was "taken to the ground," per the Guardian.

Maryland prosecutors said that LaSota "appears to be the leader of an extremist group known as Zizians," and a judge ruled she should be held without bail. It's not clear from the report if Zajko and Blank are also set to be held without bail. Given they were only charged with misdemeanors in Maryland, it appears likely that extradition is in their future.

Law enforcement had lost track of Blank and Zajko since the spring of 2023, and similarly, LaSota, after making bail in June of that year, had been on the run and had a bench warrant for her arrest.

As SFist noted yesterday from the mugshot photos seen below, Zajko appeared to be in (possibly willful or feigned) catatonic state, much like LaSota did in a January 2023 mugshot in Pennsylvania. LaSota and others in the group wrote frequently in blog posts about "dissociating," and about inducing sleep in a single hemisphere of the brain.

LaSota/Ziz's blog writing (now offline), which is sprawling and highly intelligent, but also unstructured and rambling, takes on topics of the rationalist movement and prominent Bay Area figures in it, as well as issues of artificial intelligence, veganism, trans identity, and the "warring" hemispheres of our brain. The writing often cited and linked to the writings of others, in the style of an academic treatise.

Ziz self-identified as a "vegan Sith," referring to the "dark side" warriors from Star Wars as a religion and wearing black robes, writing at one point, "Sometimes cops harass me for wearing my religious attire as a Sith." She also wrote of the brain hemispheres being good and sinister, with most people having one of each, and rarer people — like her — having a "double good" brain.

Acquaintances in this sphere had for several years noted the violent rhetoric that began to appear in LaSota/Ziz's writing, and one last known physical interaction with the rationalist community in 2019, at a gathering of the Berkeley-based Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) in Sonoma County, ended with LaSota and three others being arrested.

CFAR president and co-founder Anna Salamon told NBC News last week that she first became fearful of LaSota during a 2018 CFAR retreat, when LaSota began intensely discussing her belief system, which strayed from standard rationalist thinking.

"I was viscerally afraid of LaSota in a way I’ve never been viscerally afraid of anybody," Salamon said.

Salamon added, "There are a lot of young people... who would have had OK lives except they bumped into the network around LaSota."

By November 2022, LaSota's living arrangement in box trucks on the property of Curtis Lind in Vallejo appeared to be threatened, with Lind planning to call in the sheriff to evict thr group after they had stayed there rent-free for three years. (An agreement to let them park on his lot began amicably in 2019, he said, but they soon stopped paying rent.) One night, Alexander "Somni" Leatham, Suri Dao, and Emma Borhanian allegedly attacked Lind with knives and a sword, stabbing out his eye and impaling him through the chest. Lind survived the ordeal (Borhanian did not), and planned to testify against Leatham and Dao this spring — however he was killed by an assailant on January 17, three days before the shooting in Vermont.

The two "friends of Ziz," as they've been sometimes referred to, 21-year-old Teresa Youngblut and 28-yeear-old Ophelia Bauckholt, who were pulled over by Border Patrol agents in Vermont last month, had been living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in recent months, in two Airbnb units. The owner of the units told the media, after the shooting incident, that he found them suspicious, and that one of them — presumably Bauckholt, but possibly LaSota — had been seen sitting in a box truck parked outside the unit.

Youngblut is in custody in Vermont after being shot herself in the January 20 shootout. Bauckholt was fatally shot by one of the agents. A gun found in their car was registered to Zajko and linked to the killing of her parents, and a cellphone wrapped in foil had apparently been in contact with LaSota or Zajko.

LaSota had written, more than six years ago, about a dream of gathering like-minded rationalists, and particularly trans women, on boats where they could live as "anchor-outs" in the Bay Area — still connected to the community and able to "study" but not having to pay high rents. When a plan to live on a decaying tugboat off the shore of Half Moon Bay collapsed six years ago, LaSota apparently responded to an offer from Lind to park vehicles on his land.

This plan turned into the box trucks — two of which, allegedly registered to Zajko in Vermont, were left behind on Lind's property in California, and witnesses described finding much computer and medical equipment inside, including an ultrasound machine and industrial lye possibly for the use of dissolving a body.

It is not clear what LaSota, Zajko, and Blank were up to on the Maryland man's property, or what their next moves would be, but their modus operandi seemed to be parking in rural areas where few people asked questions.

As a prosecutor in Essex County, Vermont, Vincent Illuzzi, described the area to NBC where Zajko owned property, and near where Youngblut and Bauckholt were pulled over, "It’s not off the grid, but it’s the next best thing to it. Rural people leave you alone. There’s no one down the street watching you come and go."

Previously: Leader of 'Zizian' Death Cult and at Least One Other Arrested In Maryland After 20 Months on the Run