The elderly man who is the sole surviving witness to the November 2022 stabbing of Vallejo resident Curtis Lind — though he only witnessed the aftermath of the stabbing — gave a day of testimony Tuesday in Solano County.
Patrick McMillan, 81, was the best friend and tenant of Curtis Lind, 82, on Lind's Vallejo property where a group of alleged cult members were also living out of two box trucks between 2019 and 2022. On the morning of November 13, 2022, McMillan says that Lind knocked on the door of his trailer and he found his friend outside "bleeding like a stuck pig" from his right eye, with the tip of a samurai sword poking out from the middle of his chest.
As the Chronicle reports, McMillan provided seven hours of testimony Tuesday in what's called a conditional hearing, due to his frail health and the possibility that he will not be able or alive to testify at trial. But, McMillan also failed to identify the suspects in court, and admitted to memory problems.
McMillan can be seen in the KTVU report below from November 2022 discussing the attack on his friend.
On trial are Alexander "Somni" Leatham and Suri Dao, who may also have the name Tessa Berns, who have been in jail in Solano County since their arrest just after this stabbing. They are accused of stabbing Lind, with the help of 31-year-old Emma Borhanian, on a day that they were going to be evicted from Lind's property by the Solano County Sheriff's Office.
Lind previously testified at a conditional hearing that he had allowed the group, led by Jack "Ziz" LaSota, to live on the property beginning in 2019, but they had quickly stopped paying rent — and when the pandemic lockdowns began, so did an eviction moratorium in Solano County that did not end until 2022. Neighbors had already been calling the odd squatters "the cult" before any of the violence began, and they were known walk around outside naked, sometimes with gas masks.
As both McMillan and Lind have testified, the group had been throwing rocks at Lind's trailer around 1 am on November 13, 2022, and trying to open his door while he remained quietly inside, because they were angry about the eviction. Around 7 am that morning, Dao allegedly lured Lind out of his trailer, and he was attacked by Leatham, Dao, and Borhanian. He managed to defend himself, fatally shooting Borhanian and also shooting Leatham. And he survived the attack, though he was blinded in his right eye.
Lind was set to testify in the upcoming trial of Leatham and Dao, for his attempted murder and the consequent killing of Borhanian, when he was fatally stabbed on January 17, 2025. 22-year-old Maximilian Snyder remains in custody for that crime.
His stabbing brought what's been called the Zizian cult to the media's attention, with another crime across the country just days later being apparently connected. On the afternoon of January 20, 21-year-old Teresa Youngblut and 28-year-old Ophelia Bauckholt were driving on Interstate 91 in northern Vermont when they were pulled over by US Border Patrol agents. According to investigators, Youngblut and Bauckholt both pulled out guns, and both Bauckholt and Border Patrol Agent David C. Maland were killed in the ensuing shootout.
Youngblut had reportedly been in frequent contact with Snyder and LaSota. LaSota and two others were subsequently arrested the following month in Maryland, where they had been living out of a box truck on private land. They are being held on suspicion of trespassing, but also in connection with the unsolved Pennsylvania murders of the parents of another alleged cult member, Michelle Zajko.
The group appears to be devoted to radical form of Rationalism, as espoused by LaSota, which includes devout veganism, and spurious ideas about the hemispheres of the brain and morality itself. Most of the group members identify as trans women, and all are highly educated and computer savvy.
Circumstances, evidence of the cult's path of destruction, and an absence of other suspects may still make the case against Leatham and Dao easy to win for Solano County prosecutors. However, as the suspects and the group as a whole likely knew, Lind was the only eyewitness to his own attack besides the suspects themselves.
And McMillan is not the most solid witness. As the Chronicle reports, he failed to identify either Dao, who appeared via Zoom from a Chino hospital — this hospitalization has not been explained — or Leatham, who, as she has in the past, entered the courtroom with an outburst about her treatment in jail. McMillan also admitted to having memory lapses after eight strokes and nine heart attacks, though says his memory since 2022 is fairly good.
A trial date had initially been set for this month for Leatham and Dao, but it is now unclear when the trial will take place. Another pre-trial hearing is set for May 2, as KCRA reports.
None of the Zizians, or Ziz herself, has faced a jury, and so far only Leatham, Dao, and Snyder have been charged with murder. Charges in the East Coast cases are still pending.
