Inside the ‘Zizians': How a cultish crew of radical vegans became linked to killings across the United States

Independent

16-02-2025

The four wore black hooded robes and the classic protesters' Guy Fawkes mask made famous in V for Vendetta. Gathered near a secluded retreat in the woodlands of northern California, about an hour and a half outside San Francisco, they parked their vehicles to block the entrances.
Their goal was to disrupt the annual alumni retreat of the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR), a little-known Berkeley think tank associated with the subculture known as rationalism. Flyers allegedly sent out beforehand accused the Center of covering up "sex scandals", discriminating against transgender women, "violating basic principles of friendliness", and other trespasses.
Then the SWAT team swooped in. According to a later police report, officers believed — wrongly — that the protesters were armed and that there might be an "active shooter" situation. The protesters were subdued, and some would later allege that they were assaulted and mistreated in custody.
For most outsiders, this incident in November 2019 was a baffling if short-lived news story. What nobody could have known then was that it was the beginning of a dark chain of events that would ultimately result in the deaths of at least six people.
Last month, on January 17, an 82-year-old trailer yard landlord named Curtis Lind was stabbed and died in nearby Vallejo, California, by a mysterious attacker wearing a mask and a black beanie.
On January 20, more than 3,000 miles away in Vermont, a U.S. border agent and a young German maths whiz who worked as a financial trader were killed in a shootout after a traffic stop.
Meanwhile, police in Pennsylvania are still investigating the murder of an older couple who were shot dead inside their home in Chester Heights, a suburb of Philadelphia, on New Year's Eve 2022.
What links these cases, according to prosecutors, public evidence, interviews, and media reports, is a small group of ideologically radical young people — most of whom are trans or non-binary — who appear to follow a left-wing anarchist offshoot of rationalist philosophy.
In the midst of this web is a polarizing and cryptic figure known as Ziz, a 34-year-old vegan computer scientist who played a leading role in the initial protest. Depending on who you believe, she may be the highly manipulative leader of a 'Zizian' cult or simply one figure in a loose-knit network of rationalist defectors.
The whereabouts of Ziz herself, known in court documents by her legal name Jack Amadeus LaSota, remains unknown. Though wanted in two states on lesser counts, she has not been charged or deemed a person of interest in connection to any of the killings.
But her politics are central to a bizarre and tragic story involving Silicon Valley start-ups, a rent strike, allegations of abuse and indoctrination, an abandoned Alaskan tug boat, and the coming machine apocalypse.
Down and out in Silicon Valley
Ziz moved down to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2016 because, in her words, it was "sort of [her] destiny".
Her life so far certainly pointed that way. She'd earned a computer science degree from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where her father is an A.I. researcher. She'd completed an internship at NASA back in 2013.
Like many tech workers, she'd also been drawn to the rationalist subculture and to the closely intertwined 'effective altruist' movement, which had a strong presence in Berkeley. She shared some rationalists' belief that artificial intelligence would soon attain godlike power and could destroy humanity if not properly controlled.
But Ziz's attempt to break into Silicon Valley went poorly. According to her blog, she crashed out of job after job and bounced around between insecure temporary housing, all while transitioning to female (and facing prejudice for it).
Even so, she found friends among the rationalists. One of them was Gwen Danielson, another trans woman who developed a psychological theory that every person has multiple personalities within themselves, as well as techniques meant to awaken these personalities.
In 2017, Ziz and Danielson embarked together on a plan to build a "rationalist fleet" of rehabilitated old boats that could offer cheap housing to talented young compatriots, freeing them to devote their energies to "saving the world". They bought a nearly century-old tug boat named the Caleb in Alaska, and sailed it down the coast to the Bay Area.
Both forged links to CFAR, the think tank. Danielson presented some of her psychological techniques at the 2017 CFAR alumni retreat, and in 2018 Ziz reportedly joined an apprenticeship program co-run by CFAR and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, another rationalist non-profit focused on managing the risks of A.I.
Meanwhile, on her blog, Ziz was developing her own branch of E.A. and rationalist philosophy: strange, dense, and full of unusual jargon such as "anti-ethics", "dichotomy leakage", and "timeless gambits". She classified people as "zombies" and "vampires", or "single good" versus "double good".
Ultimately, her creed was anarchist and vegan. She felt that she lived in a society of "flesh-eating monsters", and that most rationalists drastically undervalued non-human life. Any future super-A.I., she believed, must benefit animals too.
"Ziz seemed like an intensely ambitious and moralistic person... who was interested in psychology and doing good things for the world," Jessica Taylor, who met Ziz at a Berkeley rationalist event in 2015 or 2016 and stayed in touch for several years, told The Independent. "They get very moralistic about philosophy."
In an interview with The San Francisco Chronicle, CFAR's executive director Anna Salamon described Ziz as "a young person who was hanging around and who I suspect wanted to be important." She claimed that Ziz repeatedly and intensely pushed MIRI to adopt Danielson's psychological theories, then soured on the group when she failed to gain influence.
Over time, however, Ziz grew apart from other rationalists. One pseudonymous "warning" website would later depict her as a manipulative cult leader who preyed on vulnerable trans people and sucked them into her 'Zizian' ideology. People close to Ziz dispute this, and allege that she was driven out of the community by abuse and mistreatment.
"There's no organization. There's no centralization. We're just a bunch of anarchist trans leftists that are trying to exist in current year in this world," said self-declared Zizian Octavia Nouzen in an interview with internet journalist and podcaster Ken the Cowboy, who assembled a detailed timeline of events and sources related to the group.
The four people who protested at CFAR in 2019 were Ziz, Danielson, Ziz's friend Emma Borhanian — who reportedly worked at Google — and a non-binary rationalist known as Somni (legal name Alexander Leatham).
According to Nouzen, who said she knew the protesters and had heard it multiple times from them, their intentions were peaceful if disruptive: occupy the bridge leading to the venue, stop eventgoers from entering the retreat property, and make their point heard. But, Nouzen said, they didn't realise there was already a group of children inside the venue — who were now unable to leave once they blocked the exits.
It's unclear why the police believed they might be armed. The four were initially charged with felony false imprisonment and child endangerment, before having their rap sheet reduced to misdemeanors.
Both Ziz and Danielson alleged that they were abused in police custody, and Ziz would later describe the whole ordeal as a profoundly demoralizing experience.
"I will actually never be able to trust society, even in a limited respect, like trusting cops to not torture you for literally doing nothing wrong[,] again,' she said in court records seen by the Chronicle.
A deadly confrontation at a California trailer yard
During this time, Ziz and Danielson apparently began to itch to live again on dry land. They wanted, in Danielson's words, a way of living that was "independent from the system of rent and social politics".
A solution appeared in the shape of Curtis Lind, a fellow boater who anchored near the Caleb at Pillar Point Harbor in Half Moon Bay.
"They were unhappy with living on the tug,' Lind later told a documentarian in 2024. "They decided that they wanted to move to my yard and buy moving vans... they could live in the moving van, and nobody would know that they're in there."
He described himself as "pretty friendly with some of them — friendly enough so that I took one of them to a Walmart to buy [her] first bra".
The group moved into R.V.s on Lind's land in Vallejo, north of the Bay. According to the Chronicle, they abandoned the Caleb at Pillar Point, where it remains to this day — rusting, partially submerged, and too expensive for harbor authorities to remove.
Meanwhile the crew's legal issues dragged on, and their lawyer fees mounted. When the pandemic struck, California temporarily banned evictions, and so the group stopped paying rent.
It's not clear exactly who lived there, apart from Borhanian, Dao, and Leatham. Lind described a rotating cast of six to eight people who came and went, and would later testify that Danielson was the "mouthpiece" of the crew.
The atmosphere between Lind and his tenants seems to have remained civil if awkward until July 2022. At that point California lifted its eviction ban, and tensions at the trailer yard began to rise.
In August 2022, according to the Chronicle, Ziz faked her death, with Borhanian and Ziz's sister Naomi telling authorities she had fallen into the water from her own sailboat, the Black Cygnet. We don't know where she was when Lind and his tenants finally came to blows on November 13, 2022.
What happened that day is disputed. One pseudonymous blog post purporting to be from someone close to the group, but which The Independent could not verify, alleged that Lind had previously threatened his tenants, and that he attacked first.
Lind, in his 2024 interview, claimed that one of the group threatened him with a knife after he obtained a court judgement against them, prompting him to buy a gun out of concern for his safety.
On the day, Lind alleged that one of the tenants tricked him into bending down to turn off the water supply and then attacked him without provocation, driving a samurai sword into his chest. "At that time I pulled out my pistol and started shooting," he said.
Whatever the truth, the incident ended with Lind and Leatham rushed to hospital in critical condition, and Borhanian dead. She had been shot and killed by Lind.
In the aftermath, prosecutors charged Dao and Leatham with Borhanian's murder. Lind, they contended, had fired in self-defence, and therefore it was the tenants who were responsible for her death. They remain in custody today, awaiting trial.
'They know how to track people down'
After this point, events get murkier. Many 'Zizians' not already imprisoned dropped off the map, while new figures appear to have fallen into their orbit.
Gwen Danielson split from the group and began living 'completely under the radar', according to her father Brett Danielson. He told the Chronicle that he'd last spoken to her around the 2024-25 winter holidays.
On December 31, 2022, according to The Boston Globe, two people visited the home of Richard Zajko, 72, and his wife and Rita Zajko, 69, in suburban Philadelphia. Shouts were heard from the home, and the visitors stayed less than 20 minutes.
A few days later, Pennsylvania police found the Zajkos dead from gunshot wounds to the head. The investigation zeroed in on their daughter Michelle Zajko, who often goes by Jamie and owned a handgun that uses the same type of ammunition.
Zajko had previously lived in the Bay Area and appears to have known Ziz for years. In February 2022, a Tumblr account allegedly belonging to Zajko accused Ziz of threatening to kill her if she did not kill a friend with whom Ziz was feuding.
No one has been charged with the elder Zajkos' death, and Jamie — who is considered a person of interest — has denied any involvement in her parents' death. She reportedly stands to inherit their estate, which has been frozen due to the ongoing investigation.
But when police detained Zajko in a hotel room on January 11, she shouted at them to notify another guest that she was in custody. The next day police returned with a warrant for the other hotel room.
Inside they found Daniel Blank, then 24, and a completely immobile and uncooperative Ziz. Officers said she lay limp as if "unconscious or dead", and had to be carried out.
Both were arrested, and Ziz was charged with misdemeanor obstruction and disorderly conduct. Eventually friends got together to fund her bail, after which she disappeared.
Two years later, in January 2025, two things happened that at first glance might seem unconnected. In Vallejo on January 17, Lind was killed outside his trailer yard while waiting to testify in the case against Dao and Leatham.
Police quickly arrested and charged 22-year-old data scientist and Oxford graduate Maximilian Snyder, who goes by Audere. Acquaintances told the Globe that he was familiar with Ziz's writings, and one has publicly alleged that he tried to raise money for her bail.
Then, in Vermont on January 20, U.S. border agents stopped a pair of young people on the interstate. One was Milo Youngblut (known in court records as Teresa), who had been reported missing by their parents one year ago — and who had applied for a marriage license with Snyder in November. The other was Ophelia Bauckholt (known at work as Felix), a German national, quantitative trader, and former coding gold medalist.
Taylor, who was friends with Bauckholt, describes her as "socially strange" and "a non-conformist", who "might not have understood normal people very well" but maintained a strong circle of close friends. She told The Independent that Bauckholt had long been interested in rationalist ideas and was a fan of Ziz's blog, before cutting contact with Taylor in late 2023.
Bauckholt and Youngblut had been under "periodic surveillance" since January 14, when a hotel employee reported them as suspicious after seeing them carrying at least one firearm and wearing black tactical gear.
Prosecutors allege that Youngblut got out of their Toyota Prius and opened fire on the officers without provocation, starting a shoot-out that killed both Bauckholt and a Border Patrol agent named David Maland.
Police are also searching urgently for Jamie Zajko, who is reportedly suspected of buying the handguns used by Youngblut and Bauckholt. A bulletin described her as armed and dangerous and said she followed an 'anti-law-enforcement ideology'.
The exact nature of the potential connections between Youngblut, Bauckholt, Snyder, and the other 'Zizians' — or, indeed, how they got involved in these situations — remains unclear.
Still, many in Ziz's old community fear they will be targeted in score-settling attacks.
'We are dealing with highly intelligent people who know how to track somebody down if they want to,' said Brett Danielson, who is concerned that his daughter may have come to harm. 'If any one of them wants to do somebody harm, they are going to do anything they can do to track them down.'
For his part, when interviewed in jail by the Chronicle, Snyder refused to comment on who killed Lind, instead dictating a letter to rationalist luminary Eliezer Yudkowsky urging him to stop eating meat and think of animals as people.
The letter began: "I am not one of Ziz's friends, and neither she nor her friends endorse me or my words so far as I know. I speak only for myself, as myself, for the sake of everyone. This I swear on my Laws."