The apparent leader of a cult-like group known as the Zizians, who have been tied to the killings of six people — including the death of a U.S. Border Patrol agent David Maland near the Canadian border last month — has been arrested along with other members of the group.
Jack “Ziz” LaSota, 34, was arrested on Sunday along with Michelle Zajko, 32, and Daniel Blank, 26. They face multiple charges including trespassing, obstructing and hindering and possession of a handgun in the vehicle, police said on Monday.
(L-R) Michelle Zajko, Jack LaSota and Daniel Blank are pictured in mugshots from the Allegany County Sheriff’s Office.
Allegany County Sheriff’s Office via AP
All three were charged after a Frostburg, Md., resident told police that three “suspicious” people had parked two box trucks on his property and asked to camp there for a month. The trucks were found in a largely remote wooded area near the Maryland-Pennsylvania line, according to police.
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, was also carrying a handgun, police said.
Zajko also was charged with resisting arrest and carrying a handgun; LaSota was charged with having a gun in a vehicle.
Allegany County State’s Attorney James Elliott, the prosecutor, said two other guns Zajko purchased were recovered in connection with the Jan. 20 shooting death of Border Patrol Agent Chris Maland, 44, following a traffic stop in Vermont.
Felix Bauckholt, a passenger in the car, died in the firefight, and the driver, Teresa Youngblut, has pleaded not guilty to federal firearms charges.
FBI agents search a neighborhood in Chapel Hill, North Carolina on Wednesday, Feb. 5, 2025., where Teresa Youngblut and Felix Bauckholt, who were involved in the shooting death of a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Vermont, had been renting homes, their landlord told The Associated Press.
WRAL-TV via AP
The judge in the case ordered LaSota, who identifies as a transgender woman, be held without bail at a hearing Tuesday, 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 multiple killings in recent years.
Read on to learn more about the Zizians, why officials believe they might be a cult and how they’ve been linked to half a dozen homicides across the U.S.
The rise of “Ziz”
LaSota, of Berkeley, Calif., was born in Alaska and studied computer science at the University of Fairbanks before accepting an internship at NASA and eventually moving to California in 2016.
Once in the Golden State, she began blogging, often publishing dark and sometimes violent blog posts under the name “Ziz.” In one section, reports The Associated Press, she described her theory that the two hemispheres of the brain could hold separate values and genders and “often desire to kill each other.”
In her writings, she spoke about being transgender and railed against perceived enemies, including so-called rationalist groups, which operate mostly online and seek to understand human cognition through reason and knowledge. Some rationalists are concerned with the potential dangers of artificial intelligence.
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While she initially agreed with them, she eventually broke away from the rationalists after they rejected her theories around gender and brain structure.
When LaSota left them behind in 2018, she solidified herself with a group of “extremely vulnerable and isolated” followers, Anna Salamon, executive director of the Center for Applied Rationality, told the San Francisco Chronicle.
According to SFGate, in the summer of 2019, LaSota and three of her associates — Gwen Danielson, Emma Borhanian and Alexander Leatham — decided to protest the rationalist movement by showing up at an alumni retreat for the Center for Applied Rationality in Sonoma County. They wore Guy Fawkes masks and handed out flyers accusing the organization of anti-trans discrimination and sexual misconduct.
The group of four were arrested and charged with child endangerment and trespassing.
In August of 2022, perhaps in an attempt to evade the law, LaSota faked her own death in a nighttime boating accident in San Francisco Bay. While an obituary was eventually published online, Coast Guard members never found LaSota’s body.
Officials believe the Zizians are an extremist group
According to prosecutors, social media postings, interviews and court reports, the Zizians are considered to be a small group of young people, most of whom identify as trans or non-binary.
It’s believed that most of the members, many computer scientists in their 20s and 30s, met online through their shared anarchist beliefs and have become increasingly violent over the years.
This combination of images from top left shows 2019 Sonoma County Sheriff’s office booking mug shots of Jack LaSota, Alexander Leatham, Emma Borhanian and, at bottom left, Gwen Danielson, court appearance of Maximilian Snyder and a Newport City Inn surveillance video image of Teresa Youngblut. They are associates of LaSota, also known as “Ziz.”
AP Photo
Their goals aren’t clear, but online writings span topics from radical veganism to gender identity to artificial intelligence.
The group is now connected to at least six homicides in Vermont, California and Pennsylvania, with the earliest dating back to November 2022.
What are the crimes the Zizians are linked to?
The most high-profile death the Zizians are connected to occurred just last month, about 32 km from the Canadian border, when Maland, a border patrol agent, was shot and killed during a traffic stop in Coventry, Vt.
Maland was trapped in a firefight after he pulled over Youngblut, 21, who is believed to be a Zizian, and her German travel companion, Baukholt.
FBI agents search a neighborhood in Chapel Hill, North Carolina on Wednesday, Feb. 5, 2025, where Teresa Youngblut and Felix Bauckholt, who were involved in the shooting death of a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Vermont, had been renting homes in the neighborhood, their landlord told The Associated Press.
(WRAL-TV via AP
Youngblut, who had been driving Baukholt’s car, got out and opened fire on Maland and other officers without warning, the FBI alleged. Baukholt tried to draw a gun but was shot and killed, a police affidavit stated. There is no confirmed or reported motive for the shooting.
Investigators had put the pair under surveillance after a hotel worker reported concerns about their all-black tactical clothing and the gun Youngblut was carrying.
During a search of the car after the shootout, authorities found cellphones wrapped in foil, a ballistic helmet, night-vision goggles, respirators and ammunition, the FBI said. They also found a package of shooting range targets, including some that had been used, two-way radios, about a dozen “electronic devices,” travel and lodging information for multiple states, as well as an apparent journal.
Teresa Youngblut, who is charged by the FBI in connection to the shooting death of US Border Patrol Agent David Maland, is seen in the office at the Newport City Inn on Jan. 14, 2025 in Newport, Vermont, in this still frame photograph from surveillance video released by the inn, who confirmed her identity.
Newport City Inn surveillance video image via AP
Three days before Maland’s death, the California landlord of a property where numerous members of LaSota’s group had once lived was brutally stabbed and had his throat slit, resulting in his death.
Maximilian Snyder, who had applied for a marriage licence with Youngbult in Washington state just two months earlier, was charged in the landlord’s murder and prosecutors alleged he was trying to prevent the landlord from testifying in another murder case tied to the Zizians.
Back in November 2022, the landlord, Curtis Lind, had sought to evict LaSota and several other alleged Zizians who had been living out of vans and box trucks on his property. Two days before the eviction deadline, Lind was impaled with a sword and partially blinded during an attack by Borhanian. Lind shot at the group in the altercation, injuring Leatham and killing Borhanian.
Concluding that Lind acted in self-defence, officials charged two other members of the group, Leatham and Suri Dao, with Borhanian’s murder and the attempted murder of Lind. LaSota was not charged, but police reported having contact with her at the scene.
A month after Lind was attacked and alleged members of the Zizians were charged with his murder, Rita and Richard Zajko were shot and killed in their home in Chester Heights, Penn., on New Year’s Eve, 2022.
Police questioned the Zajkos’ daughter, Michelle (one of the most recently arrested LaSota associates), at her home in Vermont. A few weeks later, officers briefly took her into custody at a Pennsylvania hotel but released her without charges.
LaSota and Blank were also staying at the same hotel, and LaSota was arrested and charged with obstructing the homicide investigation and disorderly conduct. She spent five months behind bars, and after being released on bail she went on the lam with Blank and Zajko for almost two years.
In this Jan. 2023 booking photo provided by the Delaware County, Pennsylvania, District Attorney’s Office, Jack LaSota refused to speak and kept her eyes closed while being photographed after being detained in a hotel in suburban Pennsylvania on Jan. 23, 2023.
(Delaware County, Pennsylvania, District Attorney’s Office via AP
According to law enforcement, Zajko is a person of interest in her parents’ deaths. Court records obtained by the Times Union indicate investigators believe she also bought the handguns used by Bauckholt and Youngblut in their Vermont shootout with Border Patrol.
What happens now?
At a Sunday hearing bail hearing via video conference, an Allegany District Court judge ordered LaSota, Blank and Zajkos be held without bail.
LaSota, according to The Associated Press, asked for pretrial release, saying she was homeless with no means of travelling. She also repeatedly requested a vegan diet, saying she could starve otherwise and was already “in a mild state of delirium” due to lack of food.
“I haven’t done anything wrong,” she told the judge.
Rebecca Francoeur-Breeden, a public defender representing LaSota, told the court Tuesday she had spoken with LaSota’s mother twice since the arrest. The lawyer noted LaSota’s educational achievements.
“This is a very, very bright person we’re dealing with,” she said.
— With files from The Associated Press
