Dragnet is out for alleged leaders Jack Amadeus “Ziz” LaSota & Michelle Jacqueline “Jamie” Zajko
BERKELEY, California––A national dragnet is out for Jack Amadeus “Ziz” LaSota, 34, also known as Andrea Phelps, and Michelle Jacqueline “Jamie” Zajko, 32, fugitive “persons of interest” in six murders and alleged leaders of a transexual vegan cult originating in Berkeley, California.
Members of the cult, called “Zizians” by some former associates, are implicated in two killings each in California, Pennsylvania, and Vermont.
The case has understandably touched off a media frenzy, not least because several “Zizians” claim veganism as a primary motive for a multi-year string of bizarre and violent behavior having nothing whatever to do with recognizable vegan or animal rights-motivated protest.
“When man bites dog”
If “When man bites dog, that’s news,” as 19th century New York Sun editor John B. Bogart claimed, citing the rarity of the event, “vegan suspected of murder” is more newsworthy still.
Humans bite dogs many times per year, according to the ANIMALS 24-7 archives, typically trying to fend off pit bull attacks on their own pet dogs, or occasionally on themselves or other humans.
By comparison, ANIMALS 24-7 has record of only 34 homicides committed by nine alleged vegans since 1981. Over the same years, FBI crime statistics record 818,000 total homicides.
Of the nine alleged vegan killers, seven were parents who starved infants to death with inappropriate vegan diets. Four of them are now serving life in prison. One committed suicide.
One veg mass murderer & two veg serial killers in 45 years
There was one vegan mass murderer: Adam Lanza, who on December 14, 2012 shot his mother, shot 20 children and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and then shot himself.
There were two alleged vegan serial killers, Michael Bear Carson, born James Clifford Carson, and his wife Suzan Barnes Carson, in prison since 1984, but unclear is whether either one was ever actually vegetarian, let alone vegan.
None of the alleged vegan killers, before the “Zizians,” claimed compassion for animals as a motive for murder.
The parents who starved their children to death, along with eight others who were apprehended in time for authorities to save their lives, were primarily religious extremists, in the names of several different cults and recognized religions, obsessed with maintaining personal purity.
“Witch hunters”
Adam Lanza appeared to have been venting generalized rage against the world.
The Carsons claimed to have been “hunting witches.” As well as claiming to be vegetarians, they claimed to be Muslims.
Their known victims––they are believed to have killed as many as nine more––included 23-year-old aspiring actress Karen Barnes, bludgeoned with a frying pan and stabbed 13 times in 1981 after she allowed them to share her apartment in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco; 26-year-old dope grower Clark Stephens of Humboldt County, California, in 1982, whom they shot, burned, and buried in chicken manure; and 30-year-old Jon Hellyar, of San Diego, in 1983, after Hellyar picked them up hitchhiking in Bakersfield, California, while driving to Santa Rosa, California.
Two to tango
San Francisco Chronicle Michael Barba, Matthias Gafni, and Megan Cassidy on February 6, 2025 traced the beginnings of the “Zizian” cult to the meeting of LaSota and fellow transsexual Gwen Danielson, then 23, at a “rationalist” event in October 2016.
They lived for a time on Danielson’s sailboat at the Berkeley Marina. Later LaSota bought his own sailboat. Still later, with partners recruited through “rationalist” online groups, they bought the 94-foot former U.S. Navy tugboat Panameta, built in 1945, renamed the Caleb and at the time anchored in Ketchikan, Alaska––LaSota’s home state.
LaSota, Danielson, and crew, what remained of it after several defections, sailed the Caleb to the Pillar Point yacht harbor in California in mid-2017. There it sank in March 2022.
Split with “Applied Rationality”
Meanwhile LaSota, Danielson, et al met Curtis Lind, an older man who lived on a 117-foot yacht docked nearby.
In 2020 Lind sold the boat and moved to a property he owned in Vallejo, California, 63 miles north. The “Zizians” followed him, living in small box trucks.
“In the summer of 2018,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle investigative team, joined by a fourth reporter, Rachel Swan, “LaSota participated in an apprenticeship program run by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and the Center for Applied Rationality,” founded by Berkeley-based artificial intelligence researcher Elizier Yudowsky, 45.
That association apparently ended when LaSota failed to convert Yudowsky and other participants in the program to veganism.
Disrupted retreat
On the afternoon of November 15, 2019, LaSota and transgender associates Alexander “Somni” Leatham, Amir “Emma” Borhanian, and Gwen Danielson disrupted a Center for Applied Rationality retreat at Westminster Woods, a 200-acre conference facility alongside the Bohemian Highway north of Occidental, California.
Charged with conspiracy, obstructing a police officer, and wearing masks for an unlawful purpose, “the four defendants ran through numerous attorneys, pushed to have judges dismissed, requested a change of venue, and leveled accusations of transphobia,” summarized the San Francisco Chronicle team.
“The foursome had difficulty finding lawyers because they only wanted to hire vegans, said Dan Kapelovitz, a Los Angeles-based defense attorney who specializes in animal-rights cases,” the San Francisco Chronicle team mentioned.
Building the cult
During the same time frame, “For years, LaSota, in rambling blog posts, set forth beliefs on topics such as machine learning, veganism, the importance of dual personalities, and the natural gifts of transgender women, luring a considerable number of followers — and critics — into the dark canyons of LaSota’s mind,” the San Francisco Chronicle team said.
On August 19, 2022 LaSota faked his own death by drowning. LaSota’s sister Naomi and the “Zizian” Borhanian claimed in affidavits to the San Mateo County Superior Court claimed to have been witnesses to LaSota falling from one of his boats and disappearing.
“While no body was found, and no death certificate issued, an obituary for Jack LaSota appeared in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and on Legacy.com,” the San Francisco Chronicle team learned.
The obituary mentioned that LaSota loved animals, one of the few published mentions of animals in connection with LaSota, despite LaSota’s vehement veganism.
Ambush of Lind brought death of Borhanian
After a dispute with the “Zizians” over unpaid rent, Lind, then 80, began carrying a pistol.
In the early morning hours of November 15, 2022, Lind testified, he was ambushed by three “Zizians” who stabbed him multiple times, blinded his right eye, and ran him through with a samurai sword.
Lind, however, shot and killed Borhanian, critically wounding Leatham.
“Prosecutors later charged Leatham, 29, and another member of the group, Suri Dao,” then 21, “with murder,” the San Francisco Chronicle team reported, “under the theory that it was their actions — not Lind’s self-defense — that directly caused Borhanian’s death,” at age 31.
“It’s not clear exactly where LaSota was during the violence,” the San Francisco Chronicle team narrated. “But hours after the incident, Jerold Friedman, who had represented LaSota in a civil suit against Sonoma County over the Occidental protest response,” was informed by a Solano County prosecutor that LaSota had been “contacted by police in Vallejo,” who found him “alive and well.”
District Attorney’s Office photo)
Zajko parents murdered
A little over six weeks after that, on the last day of 2022, Richard Zajko, 72, and his wife, Rita, 69, the parents of Michelle “Jamie” Zajko, were shot dead in their Chester Heights home, west of Philadelphia.
Michelle “Jamie” Zajko, who turned 30 on New Year’s Day 2023, was found on January 13, 2023 at the Candlewood Suites hotel in Chester, Pennsylvania. LaSota and an individual identified as Daniel Blank, who lived with Michelle “Jamie” Zajko in Vermont, were found in another room.
Charged with misdemeanor obstruction and disorderly conduct, LaSota was released on bail in June 2023, “but stopped showing up for court, prompting a judge to issue an arrest warrant. To this day, her case is pending,” the San Francisco Chronicle team said.
The “Zizians” seem to have kept low profiles for the next year and a half, but on January 16, 2025, the San Francisco Chronicle team recounted, “a Solano County prosecutor pleaded with a judge to push the case Leatham and Suri Dao toward trial, explaining that the key eyewitness, Curtis Lind, was now 82 years old with a fading memory.”
Killed the witness
Leatham and Dao were potentially facing the death penalty.
“The following day, witnesses told the Chronicle that a man wearing all black put his arm around Lind and repeatedly stabbed him in the chest. They said the assailant ran off, covered in blood, only to return and slit Lind’s throat,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported, not naming the sources apparently for their protection.
“Solano County prosecutors charged Maximilian Snyder, a 22-year-old affiliated with LaSota’s fringe group, with killing Lind in an attempt to silence a witness,” the San Francisco Chronicle added.
With that case under investigation in California, U.S. Border Patrol agent David Maland and a fellow agent whose name has not been disclosed on January 20, 2025 stopped a blue Prius on I-5 near Coventry, Vermont, about 14 miles from the Quebec border at Derby Line.
Both allegedly carried firearms bought by Michelle “Jamie” Zajko, identified by law enforcement agency bulletins as a “person of interest” in the murders of her parents.
Killed Border Patrol agent
The Prius driver was Felix “Ophelia” Bauckholt, a German transexual. The passenger, Teresa Youngblut, a 21-year-old computer science student, pulled a handgun and fired at the Border Patrol agents, killing Maland.
Return fire killed Bauckholt, wounding Youngblut.
Youngblut was soon found to have attended the elite private Lakeside High School in Seattle with Maximilian Snyder, and to have recently applied for a Washington state license to marry Snyder.
Picked up Open Vallejo, on January 27, 2025, “Snyder studied computer science and philosophy at the University of Oxford, according to a LinkedIn profile matching his name. He was named a National Merit Scholar semifinalist in 2019, according to the Seattle Times. In 2023, Snyder won $11,000 in an Artificial Intelligence alignment awards research contest, according to a post on the Effective Altruism Forum.
“Talk to me about being vegan”
“Youngblut studied computer science and computer software engineering at the University of Washington,” Open Vallejo continued.
“Youngblut, who was transported to a medical center in New Hampshire for treatment, has since been charged with two federal crimes: intentional use of a deadly weapon while forcibly assaulting or interfering with federal law enforcement, and use and discharge of a firearm during and in relation to an assault with a deadly weapon,” Open Vallejo added.
A friend of the couple, Jessica Taylor, told Open Vallejo that “veganism and animal rights are central” to the “Zizian” philosophy.
In addition, Open Vallejo reported, “A bio for an Instagram account that appears to belong to Youngblut reads, ‘talk to me about being vegan and ai alignment.’”
“Eat peanut butter & jelly sandwiches”
Snyder shared with the San Francisco Chronicle a 1,500-word statement including a passage describing animals as “my little brothers and sisters and siblings.
“They’re yours too,” Snyder wrote, “and they’ve been fighting all this time, over generation upon generation, death upon death upon death, so that one day, maybe, someone might grow up enough to save their children’s children’s children’s children.”
Though asserting “I am not one of Ziz’s friends,” saying neither LaSota “nor her friends endorse me or my words, so far as I know,” LaSota spent most of his statement “urging Eliezer S. Yudkowsky to embrace veganism,” the San Francisco Chronicle investigative team summarized.
“Eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or Clif bars or something,” Snyder said.
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