The Zizian Death Cult
This story began as part of a future Crime Culture Media documentary series on the victims and survivors of the September 11th attacks, but has quickly transformed into something much more sinister and disturbing than the murder of a single September 11th survivor.
We have decided to release this story now rather than hold it back for our documentary series in an effort to raise awareness, as one of the central figures is a fugitive from justice. We can think of no greater tribute to a man who devoted his life to service than to help bring all of those involved to justice.
UPDATE:
Border Patrol Agent David Maland, who was killed in Vermont after stopping someone near the Canadian border in January 2025, was an Air Force veteran who was on security duty at the Pentagon during the September 11th attacks, according to both his family and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). His family told the Associated Press (AP) that, “He was a devoted agent who served with honor and bravery,” and that he, “…truly embodied service over self.”
Maland’s family said that he served nearly ten years in the military and over ten as a Border Patrol Agent. Maland was a K-9 handler, serving near the Mexican border before being transferred to the Canadian border. He grew up in Minnesota where he graduated from high school in 1999. His aunt, Joan Maland, told the AP that he was about to propose marriage to his partner.
One suspect, a German national named Felix Baukholt, was also killed at the scene. Bauckholt's LinkedIn profile says that he worked as a highly paid quantitative analyst for Tower Research Capital, a financial services firm, at their Manhattan office. Reports indicate that Bauckholt was transgender, using the name Ophelia on X. He also won gold and bronze medals for Germany in the 2014 and 2015 International Mathematics Olympiad.
Another suspect, Teresa “Milo” Consuela Youngblut, 21, was injured and taken into custody. According to an FBI affidavit, “periodic surveillance” of the two started when a hotel employee reported seeing Youngblut carrying a gun and both wearing black tactical gear. Investigators reportedly tried to question them, and were told the pair was looking for property to buy and did not wish to speak further with investigators.
About two hours before the shooting, investigators watched Baukholt leave a Walmart with aluminum foil that he used to wrap up objects that officers couldn’t identify while sitting in the passenger seat of his car. According to the FBI, Maland pulled them over on Interstate 91 for an immigration inspection. It is unknown if this stop was requested by the FBI or Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as a result of the earlier surveillance.
Youngblut, who was driving Baukholt’s car, got out and opened fire without warning, killing Maland. Baukholt tried to draw a gun, too, but was shot dead by officers.
Items found during a search of the car include:
Cellular phones wrapped in aluminum foil
Two-way radios and about a dozen other electronic devices
A ballistic helmet
A night-vision monocular
Two full-face respirators
A tactical belt with a holster and a loaded magazine
48 rounds of .380-caliber jacketed hollow point ammunition
Used and unused shooting range targets
Travel records documenting their trip through multiple states
A journal allegedly kept by Youngblut
Things start to go even more sideways from here. Here’s a graphic to help you navigate; we made it to help us navigate, as this story is complex and confusing.
U.S. Attorney Michael Drescher filed a court motion in which the prosecution alleges that the guns used by Youngblut and Bauckholt were purchased by a third person in Vermont who is also a person of interest in a double homicide that happened in Pennsylvania.
In that case, Richard Zajko, 72, and Rita Zajko, 69, were shot dead in their home in Chester Heights, outside of Philadelphia, on New Years Eve 2022, according to the Toronto Sun. Their bodies were found two days later when officers performed a welfare check. Police at the time made a statement that the killings were “not random.”
Drescher also said that Youngblut and Bauckholt “are acquainted with and have been in frequent contact with” a person detained during the Zajko investigation who also is a “person of interest” in a homicide investigation in Vallejo, California. Authorities have not publicly identified this suspect.
The news site VTDigger reported that federal authorities issued an alert to firearms dealers seeking information about purchases made by Michelle Jacqueline Zajko which described him and/or her as a person of interest in the murder of a Border Patrol agent.
According to a voter registration database, Michelle Zajko lived at the same home address as Richard and Rita Zajko in 2016. In 2021, someone named Michelle Zajko bought undeveloped property in Derby, VT, a few miles from the Canadian border.
The FBI also said that DHS was investigating a potential, unidentified third accomplice. It is unclear if this third accomplice is Zajko, because according to the non profit media outlet Open Vallejo, Maximilian Snyder, a 22-year-old data scientist, was arrested on suspicion of a totally different murder, accused of killing 82-year-old landlord Curtis Lind.
According to the AP, public records show that Snyder and Youngblut applied for a marriage license in King County, WA, although it is unclear whether they ever actually married. Youngblut, also transgender, was a computer science student at the University of Washington, according to her Facebook profile. This is allegedly where the pair first met.
Lind was murdered when he was stabbed in the neck on the sidewalk outside of his property in California by a masked assailant wearing a black beanie three days before Youngblut was wounded in the shooting in Vermont.
On November 13, 2022, Lind was seriously injured after being attacked by tenants at the same property, according to Open Vallejo. Prosecutors allege that Lind was killed to silence his testimony in the case surrounding the 2022 attack, in which Lind was impaled with a katana through the chest and also lost an eye by tenants who had stopped paying rent during the Covid pandemic. When Lind sought to have them evicted, the violence allegedly began after they threw rocks at him.
Following this initial attack, the tenants asked Lind to come out of his mobile home to help them with a water leak when they ambushed him and “jumped him with a bunch of knives and swords, apparently with the intent of chopping him up and dissolving him in a bath of chemicals, which they had prepared,” his close friend Thomas Young told Open Vallejo. Lind survived but was hospitalized for a month, losing his right eye in the attack.
Court records show that Lind managed to shoot two of his attackers, injuring one and killing 31-year-old Emma Borhanian, who is reportedly transgender.
Suri Dao and Alexander Jeffrey Leatham, the other person who was shot by Lind as well as the one who stabbed him with the katana, were charged with murder, attempted murder, and aggravated mayhem for the death of Borhanian and the attempted killing of Lind.
Snyder studied computer science and philosophy at the University of Oxford, according to a LinkedIn profile, and was named a National Merit Scholar semifinalist in 2019 while attending the prestigious, private Lakeside School in Seattle with Youngblut, according to The Seattle Times.
Another possible third accomplice was indicated via the online forum LessWrong.com, with posts that allege that the people involved are associated with Jack LaSota, who goes by Ziz, and has also reportedly used the name Andrea Phelps.
LaSota is accused of obstructing law enforcement and disorderly conduct. Authorities have not disclosed if those charges are related to the Zajko deaths, but court records say that police were searching for a gun used in two killings when they arrested LaSota at a hotel about 10 miles from the home where Richard Zajko and Rita Zajko were murdered. Michelle Zajko was also arrested at the hotel, as was another associate, Daniel Blank.
In 2019, LaSota, Emma Borhanian, and Alexander Jeffrey Leatham were arrested together while protesting an event hosted by the Center for Applied Rationality, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The protesters showed up in a school bus and a flatbed truck, dressed in Guy Fawkes masks and black robes, reportedly blocking driveways. A SWAT team was eventually called in to deal with the group.
LaSota may have also been present during the 2022 attack on Lind, according to court documents, which also mention that LaSota faked his own death in August 2022 when the Coast Guard responded to a report that LaSota had fallen out of a boat in San Francisco Bay. They conducted a search but didn’t find a body, according to documents related to a civil rights lawsuit LaSota and others filed after their 2019 arrest. An obituary was published, and LaSota’s mother confirmed his death to LaSota’s criminal defense attorney.
Months later, a prosecutor emailed the attorney to tell him that LaSota was “alive and well,” and had been identified by police at the location of a crime committed on the same day that Lind was attacked.
LaSota, also known as Ziz, is reportedly the figurehead at the center of what is being called a “death cult” consisting of highly educated, transgender vegan radicals within the tech industry. The cult members are referred to as “Zizians.”
LaSota ran a blog, or rather, Ziz ran a blog, titled VOID GODDESS: OUR SACRED LADY OF THE WINDING FRACTAL. Enter at your own risk; it’s one of the most insane bits of text I’ve ever had the misfortune to sort through. It features posts like this one, in which LaSota accuses Jasper “Gwen” Danielson of mind controlling him:
According to the Daily Mail, LaSota’s father is an Artificial Intelligence researcher at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and LaSota graduated from the same University with a degree in computer engineering. LaSota managed to score prestigious internships at NASA and Oracle, followed by an alleged stint at Google and an apprenticeship with the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) and the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR), according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Jessica Taylor, a former research fellow at MIRI who knew LaSota, told Open Vallejo that “stuff got weird” as LaSota began pushing beliefs like that people have “conflict between their two brain hemispheres, only one of which is good.”
Taylor explained to Open Vallejo that veganism and animal rights are central ideals in the Zizian ideology and that the Zizians believe that people can “split their consciousness between two personalities by waking one side of the brain at a time.”
She extrapolates on her own blog:
Ziz and friends… were trying to "jailbreak" themselves and each other, becoming less controlled by social conditioning, more acting from their intrinsic values in an unrestricted way.
Ziz and crew had a "hemisphere" theory, that there are really two people in the same brain, since there are two brain halves, with most of the organ structures replicated.
They also had a theory that you could put a single hemisphere to sleep at a time, by sleeping with one eye open and one eye closed. This allows disambiguating the different hemisphere-people from each other ("debucketing"). (Note that sleep deprivation is a common cause of delirium and psychosis, which was also relevant in my case.)
Based on the text from LaSota’s blog, the “intrinsic values” they were acting from in an unrestricted way were literally psychopathy.
Jessica Taylor reportedly warned Baukholt about the Zizians:
“I remember warning Ophelia that Zizians were a death cult with a high local death rate…,” she wrote on X. “Idk if this involved Ziz or associates but… well, Bayesian evidence (lefty radical violence + violent women).”
Everyone connected to the Zizians were part of a Bay Area subculture called “rationalism,” a movement allegedly organized around attempts at improving human cognition. The Zizian contingent of this movement reportedly believed that the transgendered were “intrinsically gifted.”
And they had a dream: to assemble a fleet of boats to host a community of transgender vegan rationalists living off grid called the “Rationalist Fleet,” or “Rat Fleet” for short. Danielson owned a small sailboat that Danielson and LaSota both lived on where they came up with their "Rat Fleet" idea. They went to Ketchikan, Alaska and bought an old tugboat named the Caleb from the WWII era in an effort to kickstart a housing solution for the Zizians.
“We both recognized housing as one of the most obvious problems with the Bay area rationalist community, and decided to start a federated fleet of boats in order to cause rationalists to have cheaper housing in order to improve the rate of work on AI safety,” Danielson reportedly wrote on her blog, which has since been taken down.
Jessica Taylor wrote on X that she heard from a documentary production company that “Gwen Danielson has likely killed herself (delaying a trial involving Gwen), although no body has been found yet.”
It is unclear if Danielson is actually dead or, like LaSota, faked death in an effort to avoid legal culpability for a wide variety of criminal acts. The registered owners of the vessel were Jasper “Gwen” Danielson and Daniel Powell, a Navy veteran whose facebook profile says that he now works as an Air Traffic Controller. The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority has a Daniel Powell listed on its recruiting page but it’s unclear if this is the same Daniel Powell. He remains friends with Danielson on Facebook.
After they sailed back to California, they anchored the Caleb outside of the Bay Area harbor loaded with thousands of gallons of diesel fuel. When the Coast Guard came aboard for a surprise inspection, they found what they called “an imminent threat to the public health."
Armed with this information, the intrinsically gifted “rationalists” Danielson and LaSota reportedly bought two more boats. Meanwhile, the Caleb drifted into some other boats, and locals reportedly referred to the people living on the boats as "feral humans."
They befriended Curtis Lind in the harbor; he was the only person docked in the harbor with a boat bigger than theirs, according to the Chronicle. Lind sold his boat when he retired and moved to some property he owned in Vallejo, CA.
After the Zizians got tired of Salt Life (and ran out of money, per LaSota’s blog), they decided what they really needed was a fleet of RVs, not a fleet of boats. They made a deal to pay Lind to rent two RVs and park them at his property, along with several box trucks, for $2,000 a month.
According to the Chronicle, Lind’s friend, Patrick McMillan, testified that Danielson was the groups “mouthpiece.” In their very first conversation, Danielson reportedly asked McMillan if he’d be willing to do a straw purchase to illegally acquire firearms for the group.
A few months later they stopped paying rent, citing COVID restrictions meant to prevent evictions for people who had lost work due to the pandemic. Meanwhile, the county decided that the Caleb was not seaworthy and ordered the owners to remove it. When no one responded, the harbor filed a lawsuit, and in 2022 Danielson was forced to move the Caleb to a work dock. The harbor reportedly paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to have a salvage company remove hazardous waste from the vessel around the same time that LaSota faked his death by pretending to fall from the boat.
The Caleb was eventually abandoned for a second time and ended up drifting out to sea, floundering on some rocks off the coast of Pillar Point near Half Moon Bay, a popular spot for surfers. The cost of the salvage operation to remove it is reportedly estimated at $2 million.
So far, the only thing connecting this sprawling web of insanity is this so-called Zizian cult centered around LaSota, who reportedly missed multiple court dates in both PA and CA after being let out on bail despite being at the center multiple murders. His current whereabouts are unknown.
His Facebook friends list is as interesting as it is unsettling, revealing that the alleged cult leader has connections to numerous alumni and faculty from prestigious universities including Brown, Harvard, Duke, Princeton, Cornell, Stanford, John Hopkins, Rice (Danielson, specifically), Penn State, Carnegie Mellon, Oxford, MIT, CUNY, NYU, and UC Berkeley.
Alexander Leatham was the subject of an article published in the Yale Daily News titled “Act Your Gender” which was penned by his sister, Julia Leatham, who graduated from Yale with a degree in Film and Media Studies in 2021.
Her LinkedIn also reports that she attended the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy; it’s unclear if her brother was also an alumni. Julia Leatham currently works as a writers assistant for award winning screenwriter Eric Roth, who has writing credits on House of Cards, Forrest Gump, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Munich, Dune, and Killers of the Flower Moon.
His friends in tech include: a Senior Hardware Engineer at NVIDIA, an Engineering Manager at Facebook, a System Software Engineer at Apple, multiple Google software Engineers including one working in Tools and Infrastructure and another working as a Privacy Engineer, the Co-Founder and CTO of Temple Capital, Alexei Andreev, and the CEO of Metamorph AI, Aurora Quinn-Elmore.
One is forced to wonder what these highly educated digerati thought of the peculiar rants he would go on, for instance where he said it was “often true” that “X’s aren’t people.”
Some of his posts were shorter variations on similar themes found in the rants that featured on his blog, wherein he referred to sleeping only half the night as a form of technology. Some were literal links to said rants.
Okay, I have to re-read this when not on a bus. This seems really peculiar in more ways than one.