Member of Zizian group says she did not kill her parents
The group has been linked to killings in Vermont, Pennsylvania and California. A cross-country investigation into LaSota and the Zizians broke open in January when one member of the group died and another was arrested after the shooting death of U.S. Border Patrol Agent David Maland in Vermont.
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Authorities say Zajko provided the gun that was used in the Vermont shooting, and in February, she, LaSota and another associate were arrested in Maryland and charged with trespassing, obstructing law enforcement and illegal gun possession after a man told police that three 'suspicious' people parked box trucks on his property and asked to camp there.
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She also was questioned but not charged in connection with the deaths of her parents, Rita and Richard Zajko, who were shot and killed in their Chester Heights, Pennsylvania, home on New Year's Eve 2022. A few weeks later, LaSota was charged with disorderly conduct after refusing to cooperate with officers investigating the deaths, but Zajko said LaSota was just 'in the wrong place at the wrong time.'
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'The police lied to her & told her that I had confessed (to something I didn't do),' she wrote.
'My friends and I are being described as like Satan's lapdogs, the devil & the Manson family all rolled into one,' she wrote. 'These papers are flagrantly lying. For instance, there were no truck-fulls of guns, no machine gun, & I didn't murder my parents.'
Members of the Zizian group also have been tied to the death of one of their own during an attack on a California landlord in November 2022 and the landlord's subsequent killing in January. Maximilian Snyder, who is charged with killing landlord Curtis Lind, had applied for a marriage license with Teresa Youngblut, who is accused of shooting at the Border Patrol agent in Vermont. But Zajko said Youngblut had fled from Snyder in November.
'The newspapers do not seem to realize that there are multiple groups, & that my friends & I are not with Snyder,' she wrote.
Youngblut is accused of firing at Maland during a traffic stop and has pleaded not guilty to federal firearms charges. Felix Bauckholt, a passenger in the car, also was killed in a shootout.
Bauckholt and LaSota were living together in North Carolina as recently as this winter, according to their landlord, who also was renting a duplex to Youngblut in the same neighborhood. Zajko's lawyer said Tuesday that Zajko also had been living in North Carolina before the group moved north to Frostburg, Maryland.
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'The news media has utterly terrified this small town into thinking we were here to hurt them,' wrote Zajko, who said their only plans were 'eating (vegan) soft pretzels with guacamole, repairing a diesel heater, & camping.'
Zajko also alleges that LaSota and others were victims of a smear campaign led by people associated with rationalism, a movement that seeks to understand human cognition and address the potential dangers of artificial intelligence. 'Stalkers and abusers' within the community have tried to discredit Zizians for trying to expose sexual abuse within rationalist organizations, she said.
She described LaSota as an extraordinary friend who rescued her from an abusive relationship.
'Ziz is not my leader, and I am not her's. What we have is called friendship, and I love her infinitely more than I could ever express,' she wrote. 'She doesn't deserve her bad reputation. She deserves to be free.'
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