A criminal cult that combines transgender and vegan identities as unifying elements is accused of orchestrating six violent deaths across the United States. Ziz LaSota, born Jack LaSota, a 34-year-old transgender woman, is accused of leading the extremist group called the “Zizians.” The group allegedly orchestrated murders in California, Pennsylvania and Vermont between 2022 and 2025, according to federal authorities.
Authorities consider LaSota “the leader of an extremist group” linked to the violent deaths, said Allegany County prosecutor James Elliott during a hearing Feb. 18, 2025, according to the Associated Press.
“This is more important than this little hearing,” LaSota told a judge during a bail hearing in February 2025, according to the New York Times. She demanded vegan food in prison.
LaSota, who stands over six feet tall and often wears a black cape, became known in the Rationalist community of the San Francisco Bay Area. This highly cerebral philosophical movement dedicates itself to improving the world through logical thinking. It is particularly concerned about whether artificial intelligence will eventually surpass and destroy humanity. The movement has counted Peter Thiel and Sam Bankman-Fried among its members and has influenced figures like Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Nate Silver.
But LaSota turned to an ultra-radical version of this philosophy. She began writing favorably about violence. She said she was ready to sacrifice everything to achieve her goals. She considered the threat of AI to humanity “the most important problem in the world,” she wrote on her blog.
The cult reveals a troubling tactic. The group uses transgender identity both as a rallying point and as a rhetorical weapon against critics. Members systematically accuse anyone who opposes them of transphobia. They also claim transgender women possess a distinct neurotype particularly gifted for AI safety research.
A Community Gone Wrong
The story begins mundanely with a job search and quest for affordable housing. LaSota was born in Alaska and arrived in the San Francisco Bay Area in the mid-2010s after obtaining a computer engineering degree from the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Her father, Daniel, an artificial intelligence professor, hails from Beverly, Massachusetts. The family experienced troubles. In the late 1980s, LaSota’s grandfather, Robert LaSota, a professor at Salem State University, was convicted of sexually assaulting his youngest daughter, according to the Boston Globe.
As a child, LaSota was precocious but had social difficulties. In middle school, the teenager was part of a group of students who successfully infiltrated the school district’s payroll system. They awarded enormous paychecks to teachers they admired while reducing the salaries of those they despised, according to a teacher quoted by the Boston Globe.
LaSota arrived in the San Francisco Bay Area after completing an internship at NASA. She began using feminine pronouns and struggled to keep a job. She complained about overtime expectations at a video game startup, according to her blog. Instead, she found community in Berkeley’s esoteric rationalist scene.
“The idea is that the mind is full of software and hardware that can be improved. You can eliminate assumptions and cultural scripts that don’t serve you,” explained a former Bay Area rationalist to the Boston Globe. “It’s a group that aggressively venerates truth and clarity.”
LaSota was often distant and critical at these gatherings. “Jack LaSota is a wannabe Sith lord,” the former rationalist told the Boston Globe. Perpetually dressed in a hooded black robe, she resembled the character.
Rationalists pride themselves on inclusivity. LaSota’s eccentricities raised few alarms among the eclectic assembly of bohemians, goths and nerds seeking to improve themselves and the world.
Identity Manipulation
LaSota quickly developed a particular tactic to silence critics. When Discord platform moderators objected to her group’s use of handles composed of symbols rather than alphanumeric characters, the group accused them of transphobia.
“They say, ‘You’re forcing us into legibility, and trans people are illegible, and this is an important expression of my identity,'” said Ozy Brennan, a non-binary transgender rationalist writer, to the New York Times.
This vision harmonized with their belief that transgender women have a distinct neurotype particularly gifted for AI safety research, according to Brennan in the same New York Times interview.
“We called them ‘the incomprehensible group,'” Brennan told the New York Times. In a Discord exchange, group members insisted on using Discord handles composed of symbols rather than alphanumeric characters.
LaSota’s circle was predominantly composed of transgender or non-binary people. Several worked or interned at technology companies like Google, Oracle and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. One had dropped out of Rice University to work on AI safety.
The group began adopting cult-like patterns. It used apocalyptic language and pitted members against each other in an “us versus them” mentality. LaSota promoted a sleep deprivation technique supposedly designed to determine a person’s level of goodness. She also promoted radical veganism.
From Boats to Trucks
LaSota’s first big idea was that the San Francisco Bay Area rationalist community should live aboard boats in the region’s numerous marinas. Paying rent was “bad praxis,” in her words. If everyone moved onto boats, the community could stop paying enormous sums to landlords and dedicate itself to the real work of saving the world from artificial intelligence abuse.
In 2017, she launched recruitment for participants to join what she called a “Rationalist Fleet.” LaSota and a companion, Gwen Danielson, went hunting for cheap boats. They settled on the Caleb, a rusty World War II-era tugboat they piloted from Alaska to Half Moon Bay in Northern California.
Curtis Lind was quickly drawn into this eccentric circle. He was at the docks one day and fell in love with the old tugboat at first sight. “He was a ship magnet. Note, ‘magnet,’ not ‘magnate,'” said Thomas Young, Lind’s closest friend, to the Boston Globe. “Big boats were always a bit of a problem for him.”
Lind, then in his late 60s, mentioned to Danielson that he had property in Vallejo he hoped to transform into a sort of trailer park for young artists. By then, the Caleb had begun leaking crude oil, and its crew spent much time ashore, living in box trucks.
Within weeks, an entire cast of characters — including LaSota — had taken residence on Lind’s property. LaSota, under the name Ziz, had attracted a small but fervent group of followers.
Escalation to Violence
In November 2019, LaSota and several followers organized a protest at a camping property located in the woods north of San Francisco. They wore Guy Fawkes masks and robes. They were there to disrupt an event organized by the Center for Applied Rationality. The protesters distributed flyers claiming the center and a sister organization had “betrayed” them.
Someone called police saying the protesters had a weapon — which was incorrect. A SWAT team and helicopter invaded the area. LaSota and her team were arrested and charged with, among other things, trespassing and resisting arrest.
According to Lt. Brandon Cutting of the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office, the protesters, when questioned by police, made strange sounds — almost as if they were speaking in tongues. “It didn’t make sense to us,” Cutting told the New York Times. “And I suspect it didn’t make sense to them either.”
The group became increasingly isolated from the broader rationalist community. LaSota was banned from LessWrong. Some rationalist event organizers hired security to keep her and her followers away.
By early 2020, LaSota and a handful of others had moved to a property in Vallejo. They lived in small trucks and had agreed to pay the 80-year-old owner, Curtis Lind, $2,000 per month. When Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a moratorium on evictions because of COVID-19, the group stopped paying rent.
The Samurai Sword Murder
It was a crisp November morning in 2022 when Lind headed to one of the group’s trailers to repair a reported water leak. The tenants had grown to about two dozen, according to court documents filed that fall. They had also stopped paying rent after legislators gave tenants special protections during the pandemic.
The day Lind filed a lawsuit to evict the group, one of the tenants drew a pocket knife and smiled at him menacingly, according to an interview Lind gave last year to a documentarian, the Boston Globe reported. The next day, Lind bought a gun.
He was carrying it the day of the leak, as he walked to the back of a trailer to shut off the water supply. When he bent over, he was struck in the head. When he regained consciousness, three tenants stood over him.
“The right side of my skull was smashed. My nose was pushed in. And I was bleeding from numerous puncture wounds, I think about 50,” Lind recalled in the interview with the documentarian, according to the Boston Globe. “The back of my neck had severe cuts, as if someone was trying to cut my head off.”
He looked down to see a samurai sword protruding from his chest. He grabbed the gun and fired wildly, killing Emma Borhanian and wounding Alexander Leatham. Lind then crawled to a neighbor, who called an ambulance that transported him, sword and all, to a nearby hospital.
Police charged Leatham and another tenant, Suri Dao, then 21, with Borhanian’s murder and attempted murder of Lind. The other attackers — whom Lind said numbered four or five — were allowed to leave.
When Lind’s family visited the trailers after the attacks, they discovered massive amounts of technological equipment, including quantities of solar panels. They also discovered large containers of caustic lye capable of dissolving a human body, according to the Boston Globe.
A Fake Death and Murdered Parents
In the days following the stabbing, a defense attorney who had represented LaSota in a civil lawsuit concerning the Sonoma County woods protest received an intriguing email. He had come to believe his client was dead after falling into San Francisco Bay while sailing in August 2022. There was an obituary with glowing tributes and a Coast Guard report with testimony from Borhanian and LaSota’s sister to prove it.
But in reality, LaSota was there at the stabbing scene three months later, “alive and well,” according to the email, the Boston Globe reported. She was not arrested, however.
The death toll climbed from there. On Jan. 2, 2023, the parents of Michelle Zajko, a bioinformatician who was close to LaSota, were found dead in a bedroom of their Pennsylvania home, shot in the head.
Rita and Richard Zajko received two visitors just before midnight on New Year’s Eve 2022. The duo stayed less than 20 minutes. Images recorded by a neighbor’s Ring camera show this. A minute or two later, someone screamed: “Mom!” A few seconds later, the camera captured another scream: “Oh my God! Oh, God! God!” according to the Boston Globe.
Police discovered that Zajko owned a handgun with bullets whose manufacturer and type matched shell casings found near her parents’ bodies. They tracked her to a hotel in Chester, Pennsylvania.
There, they found two other people: LaSota and Daniel Blank, a University of California, Berkeley engineering graduate whom friends describe as kind but naive.
All three were arrested, but Blank and Zajko were released because there wasn’t enough evidence to hold them. LaSota, who had an active warrant in California, was charged with obstruction and disorderly conduct but eventually posted bail and disappeared once again.
“I’m sorry, Nonna,” Zajko told her grandmother when she showed up at her house around the time of the funerals, according to a relative quoted by the Boston Globe. Her eyes seemed lifeless, the relative recalled.
Witness Elimination
Things quieted down for a period. Then, in January this year, violence resumed when Lind was stabbed to death. Prosecutors accuse Maximilian Snyder, a 22-year-old computer programmer and former Oxford University student affiliated with the group, of committing the crime to prevent Lind from testifying against the “Zizians” who had attacked him.
“Mr. Lind is the only eyewitness to this case and his testimony is critical for the people to have the ability to prove their case,” prosecutors wrote in court documents Jan. 16, 2025, according to the Associated Press. “These defendants are extremely dangerous, they have both attempted to escape from custody.”
These documents were filed Jan. 16, one day before Lind was fatally stabbed on his property. Lind died at Kaiser Permanente Vallejo Medical Center shortly after the attack.
Snyder studied computer science and philosophy at the University of Oxford, according to a LinkedIn profile matching his name. He noted an interest in artificial general intelligence and a desire to “help advance humanity’s technological frontier responsibly,” according to Open Vallejo.
In November 2024, Snyder had applied for a marriage license with Teresa Youngblut, according to public records examined by Open Vallejo.
The Vermont Shooting
Three days after Lind’s murder, two other “Zizians,” Teresa Youngblut and Felix Bauckholt, were driving a Toyota Prius in Vermont when U.S. Border Patrol agents stopped them. Law enforcement had been tracking the pair for days after a hotel employee saw them wearing black tactical gear and Youngblut carrying a weapon.
Youngblut, 21, was a computer science student at the University of Washington. She had also attended the prestigious Lakeside School in Seattle, the same school as Snyder, according to the Spokesman-Review quoted by Open Vallejo.
Youngblut’s parents had reported her missing in May 2024 after she sent her mother emails saying she had moved in with a friend and changed her number, according to the Associated Press. They told police that Youngblut had emptied her room and severed her friendships. The behavior was “very unusual” for her, making them fear she was in “a controlling relationship,” according to the Seattle Times quoted by the Boston Globe.
On the roadside, Youngblut exited the car and began firing at one of the agents while Bauckholt attempted to grab a weapon, according to an FBI affidavit quoted by Open Vallejo. The agents returned fire. Bauckholt was hit and declared dead at the scene. Border Patrol agent David Maland died at the hospital.
Border Patrol agent David Maland with his service dog Cora. Source: Department of Homeland Security
FBI agents who searched the Prius found a ballistic helmet, night vision goggles, 48 rounds of ammunition, used shooting targets and a dozen electronic devices, according to the FBI affidavit quoted by the Associated Press.
Maland’s family described him as a devoted agent who was engaged and “truly embodied service before self,” according to the Boston Globe.
The Final Arrest
On Feb. 16, 2025, LaSota was arrested with Zajko and Blank in Frostburg, Maryland, after their trucks attracted the attention of a suspicious property owner. In addition to trespassing, obstruction and minor firearms charges in Maryland, she faces federal drug charges added in June, plus disorderly conduct and obstruction charges in the Pennsylvania case.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” LaSota told the judge during the Feb. 18, 2025, hearing, according to the Associated Press.
Allegany County prosecutor James Elliott said during the hearing that LaSota had faked her own death in the past and “appears to be the leader of an extremist group” called the “Zizians” that has been linked to several deaths.
LaSota, speaking hesitantly, also repeatedly requested a vegan diet, saying she might starve otherwise and was already “in a slight state of delirium” due to lack of food.
Rebecca Francoeur-Breeden, a public defender representing LaSota, said she had spoken with LaSota’s mother twice since the arrest. The attorney noted LaSota’s educational achievements, including a computer engineering degree.
“This is a very, very bright person we’re dealing with,” she said during the Feb. 18, 2025, hearing, according to the Associated Press.
Rationalist Soul-Searching
The rationalist community has debated how to respond. The murders seemed motivated less by ideology than by a mixture of revenge and mental health issues. Yet LaSota had drawn inspiration from the rationalist scene and, for a time, was an integral part of it.
“There’s this all-or-nothing thing, where AI will either bring utopia by solving all problems, if successfully controlled, or will literally kill everyone,” said Anna Salamon, director of the Center for Applied Rationality, to the New York Times. “From my perspective, that’s already partway toward apocalyptic cult dynamics.”
Eliezer Yudkowsky, a writer whose AI warnings are canonical to the movement, called the “Zizians” story “sad.”
“Many early Rationalists thought it was important to tolerate weird people. Many weird people encountered this tolerance and decided they had found their new home,” he wrote to the New York Times. “And some of these weird people turned out to be genuinely insane and contagiously so among the susceptible.”
Many Rationalists argue that the “Zizians'” actions should not be a referendum on Rationalism itself. Zvi Mowshowitz, a rationalist blogger, told the New York Times that LaSota was simply a dangerous person who latched onto Rationalism.
Troubling Signs of Mental Distress
Group members showed troubling signs of psychological distress well before the murders. These clues reveal how manipulation and mental illness converged to create a deadly cocktail.
Daniel Blank has “serious mental health concerns” and was “listed as a missing or endangered person before his arrest,” said his public defender Rebecca Francoeur-Breeden during the Feb. 18, 2025, hearing, according to the Associated Press. Pennsylvania police records describe Blank as Zajko’s roommate in Vermont.
Teresa Youngblut showed dramatic behavioral changes that alarmed her family. Her parents reported her missing in May 2024 after she emptied her room and severed all friendships. The behavior was “very unusual” for her, making her parents fear she was in “a controlling relationship,” according to the Seattle Times quoted by the Boston Globe.
Group members displayed bizarre behaviors during interactions with authorities. During the 2019 Sonoma County arrest, protesters made strange sounds when questioned by police — “almost as if they were speaking in tongues,” according to Lt. Brandon Cutting. “It didn’t make sense to us, and I suspect it didn’t make sense to them either,” he told the New York Times.
LaSota herself showed disturbing behaviors. During her 2023 arrest in Pennsylvania, she remained motionless with her eyes closed, refusing to speak or move. “She was lying inert on the floor, as if she were dead,” according to a Pennsylvania State Police affidavit quoted by the Boston Globe. It took four officers to carry her 6-foot-2-inch body to a chair in the lobby.
The group itself promoted dangerous ideas about mental health. The “Zizians” apparently believed the brain’s two hemispheres can house separate personalities by awakening one side at a time, according to Jessica Taylor, who knew Felix Bauckholt, in an interview with Open Vallejo. LaSota also promoted a sleep deprivation technique supposedly designed to determine a person’s level of goodness.
Taylor, who knew Bauckholt as Ophelia, called the “Zizians” a “murder gang” in her Open Vallejo interview. In her X posts, she also called the group a “death cult” with a “high local death rate.”
The group’s isolation from the broader Rationalist community worsened these problems. “The rationalist community is not very good at defusing, or even noticing radical extremism that’s brewing,” said Octavia Nouzen, a rationalist who regularly reads “Zizians” essays, to the Boston Globe. “There’s this tendency to be dispassionate and to divorce the emotional tone of a text from its actual philosophical content.”
For Brennan, the rationalist writer, the healthy response to fears of an AI apocalypse is to embrace “strategic hypocrisy”: Save for retirement, have children if you want them. “You can’t live in the world acting like the world is going to end in five years, even if it is, in fact, the case,” they told the New York Times. “You’ll just go insane.”
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