(KRON) — A Maryland court on Tuesday ordered a blogger known as Ziz who leads a cultlike group connected to six killings held without bail.
The blogger, Jack LaSota, 34, of Berkeley, California, was arrested Sunday along with Michelle Zajko, 32, of Media, Pennsylvania, and Daniel Blank, 26, of Sacramento, California. They face charges including trespassing, obstructing and hindering and possession of a handgun in a vehicle.
The Zizians have been tied to the killing of U.S. Border Patrol Agent David Maland near the Canadian border in January and five other killings in Vermont, Pennsylvania and California.
LaSota, Zajko and Blank were arrested in Frostburg, Maryland, on Sunday afternoon.
The judge in the case ordered LaSota held without bail citing concerns about her being a flight risk and a danger to public safety. Prosecutors said LaSota “appears to be the leader of an extremist group known as Zizians” that has been linked to killings.
Lasota, Zajko and Blank were arrested in Frostburg, Maryland, about 150 miles west of Baltimore on Sunday afternoon. They were transported to a county detention center, where they are being held, Maryland State Police said in a statement.
The Zizians have been tied to the death of a woman during an attack on a California landlord in November 2022, the landlord’s subsequent slaying in January, the December 2022 deaths of Zajko’s parents in Pennsylvania and a highway shootout last month in Vermont that left Maland and a car passenger dead.
A Frostburg resident told police he wanted three “suspicious” people off his property after they’d parked two box trucks there and asked to camp for a month, according to police documents.
They were dressed in black and two wore gun belts holding ammunition, according to police. Officers found a rifle in the back of one truck and a handgun on the front floorboard. Zajko, who refused to put her hands behind her back and was taken to the ground, also was carrying a handgun, police said.
Maland, 44, was killed in a Jan. 20 shootout following a traffic stop in Coventry, Vermont, a small town about 20 miles from the Canadian border.
Officials have offered few details of the cross-country investigation. Associated Press interviews and a review of court records and online postings tell the story of how a group of young, highly intelligent computer scientists, most of them in their 20s and 30s, met online, shared anarchist beliefs, and became increasingly violent.
Their goals aren’t clear, but online writings included topics such as radical veganism, gender identity and artificial intelligence.
At the center of it all is “Ziz,” the leader of the group, whose members are sometimes called “Zizians” in online forums.
LaSota published a dark and sometimes violent blog under the name Ziz and, in one section, described her theory that the two hemispheres of the brain could hold separate values and genders and “often desire to kill each other.”
LaSota used she/her pronouns, and in her writings says she is a transgender woman. She railed against perceived enemies, including so-called rationalist groups, which operate mostly online and seek to understand human cognition through reason and knowledge. Some are concerned with the potential dangers of artificial intelligence.
LaSota has not responded to emails from the AP in recent weeks, and her attorney, Daniel McGarrigle, declined to comment on whether she is connected to any of the deaths. She’s wanted in two states for missing court appearances.
McGarrigle would only confirm Monday that he has represented LaSota and wouldn’t confirm her arrest or any details of the latest case. Attempts to reach attorneys for Zajko and Blank were not successful.
Pennsylvania state police records describe Daniel Blank as Michelle Zajko’s housemate in Vermont. In January 2023, police investigating the shooting deaths of Zajko’s parents detained both LaSota and Blank at a hotel where Zajko was staying. Blank was not charged. LaSota was charged with obstructing law enforcement and disorderly conduct.
Who is Ziz?
Jack LaSota moved to the San Francisco Bay area after earning a computer science degree from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 2013 and interning at NASA, according to a profile on a hiring site for programmers, coders and other freelance workers. NASA officials did not respond to a request to confirm LaSota’s internship, but a Jack LaSota is listed on a website about past interns.
LaSota began promoting an extreme mix of rationalism, ethical veganism, anarchism and other value systems, said Jessica Taylor, an AI researcher who met LaSota both in person and online through the rationalist community.
When LaSota left the rationalists behind, she took with her a group of “extremely vulnerable and isolated” followers, Anna Salamon, executive director of the Center for Applied Rationality, told the San Francisco Chronicle.
Taylor said Ziz adherents use the rationalist ideology as a reason to commit violence. “Stuff like thinking it’s reasonable to avoid paying rent and defend oneself from being evicted,” she said.
Poulomi Saha, a professor who has studied cults, said LaSota’s beliefs and writings may have made readers feel seen, an often central factor in the formation of groups commonly labeled cults. That’s especially true in the era of online communities, in which it’s easier for marginalized people to seek fellow believers.
Declared dead in California
In San Mateo County, California, court records show Jack “Ziz” Amadeus LaSota was declared deceased by a judge more than two years ago after she allegedly fell from a boat overboard into the San Francisco Bay.
LaSota may have faked her own death, the records show. She vanished into ocean waters halfway between Alameda and South San Francisco on Aug. 19, 2022, according to two people who were onboard LaSota’s boat. Her body was never found during a two-day, 167-square-nautical-mile search by the U.S. Coast Guard.
LaSota’s sister, and her friend, Emma Borhanian, wrote detailed accounts about what allegedly happened. The sister said their boat, named The Black Cygnet, launched from a harbor in San Francisco Bay and navigated past Treasure Island. At one point, LaSota “leaned over the engine” and fell in the water, the sister wrote in court documents.
“Emma looked for a life preserver and I called the Coast Guard moments after it happened. We tried to turn the boat around but did not see Jack anywhere. The Coast Guard search effort failed to find Jack,” the sister wrote.
LaSota’s body was never found, Coast Guard officials said it wasn’t possible to survive in the bay’s frigid waters beyond 24 hours, and none of her friends nor family ever heard from LaSota after the accident, the sister wrote. Borhanian wrote a similar story in court documents, declaring that “Ziz” was “lost at sea.”
An obituary published for LaSota stated that she loved “adventure” as well as “music, blueberries, biking, computer games, and animals.”
Another boat previously owned by LaSota, named The Caleb, can still be found partially sunk in Pillar Point Harbor. LaSota and her group lived on the 94-foot-long boat near Half Moon Bay until it was abandoned in early 2022, court records show.
Some of The Caleb’s crew reportedly ditched the boat and moved onto 82-year-old Curtis Lind’s property in Vallejo. Lind was stabbed to death on Jan. 17, 2025. Maximilian Bentley Snyder, a 22-year-old data scientist and Zizian ideology follower, is charged with Lind’s murder.
Ziz and followers’ first run-in with the law
In November 2019, LaSota was arrested along with several other people at a protest outside a Northern California retreat center where the Center for Applied Rationality was holding an event. Sheriff’s deputies called in a SWAT team and armored vehicle after the mask-wearing group blocked the property’s exits and handed out fliers railing against the rationalist organization. The group said they were protesting sexual misconduct inside the rationalist group.
It wasn’t long before Ziz surfaced again.
A landlord is attacked in California
By the autumn of 2022, LaSota had moved with other group members, including Borhanian and Leatham, into vans and box trucks on property owned by Lind in Vallejo, about 30 miles north of San Francisco.
“Emma’s van was amazing,” said someone who knew Borhanian. “It had a refrigerator and freezer and microwave. It was truly a work of art.”
The person, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of fears for her safety, described Borhanian as a kind and loving young woman so smart that she worked at Google while in college. Google did not respond to an inquiry about Borhanian’s employment there.
Prosecutors say she was among those who attacked Lind on Nov. 13 when he tried to evict the group for not paying rent.
Impaled by a sword and partially blinded, Lind, who was 82, fought back, fatally shooting Borhanian. Concluding that Lind acted in self-defense, officials charged Leatham and Suri Dao, 23, with murder in Borhanian’s death, as well as the attempted murder of Lind.
A person reached by an Associated Press reporter at a phone number listed for Alex Leatham’s father declined to comment. Attempts to reach family members for Dao were not successful.
Police believe LaSota was at the scene of the crime, but she was not arrested.
Meanwhile, the case regarding Lind was headed to trial. The landlord was the only eyewitness, and prosecutors wanted to hurry along the proceedings.
But on Jan. 17, Lind’s throat was cut and he died not far from where he had survived the earlier attack.
An elderly couple is killed in Pennsylvania
On New Year’s Eve of 2022, a couple was shot and killed in their home in Chester Heights, Pennsylvania.
A doorbell camera captured audio and video of a car pulling up to the home of Richard Zajko, 71, and his wife, Rita, 69. A voice shouts “Mom!” and another voice exclaims, “Oh my God! Oh, God, God!” according to a Pennsylvania state police affidavit. Police found the couple shot in the head in an upstairs bedroom after they failed to show up to take care of Rita’s mother.
Police questioned the couple’s daughter, Michelle, at her home in Vermont, and a few weeks later, took her into custody at a Pennsylvania hotel. She wasn’t arrested or charged. LaSota was at the hotel, too, and was arrested after refusing to cooperate with officers, and charged with obstructing law enforcement and disorderly conduct.
Six months later, LaSota was released on bail but stopped showing up for court.
A Border Patrol agent dies in a shootout Vermont
On. Jan 20, in Vermont, U.S. Border Patrol agents stopped a vehicle carrying two people connected to the Ziz group. A hotel worker had called authorities after seeing one of them, Teresa Youngblut, with a gun.
Youngblut was driving the car when it was pulled over on Jan. 20, and authorities say she quickly opened fire on officers. The passenger, Felix Bauckholt, a German national who is also listed in court documents as Ophelia, died, along with the border patrol agent, David Maland.
Youngblut was wounded and arrested and has pleaded not guilty to firearms charges.
Authorities who searched the car found a ballistic helmet, night-vision goggles, respirators and ammunition, the FBI said. They also found two-way radios and used shooting range targets.
Youngblut had applied for a marriage license with Snyder, the man accused of murdering the elderly landlord. He was a childhood friend; it was unclear if they were married. Authorities say the gun she was carrying was purchased by a person of interest in the Zajko killings.
The last sighting of Ziz
Youngblut and Bauckholt had been living at two condos in North Carolina, where that landlord and neighbors now say they saw odd behavior.
LaSota also had been living there as recently as this winter, said the landlord, who reviewed LaSota’s 2019 police booking photo. He spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity because he was concerned for his safety.
Expressing similar concerns, a neighbor who lived on the other side of Bauckholt’s duplex until September 2023 recalled seeing three people wearing long black robes and tactical clothes.
“They rarely came out during the day but would walk around the neighborhood and in the woods at night,” the former neighbor said, who also spoke only on condition of anonymity because of concerns for their safety. “Sometimes all three of them would go for a walk and they all held hands. They seemed to care for each other a great deal.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
