Known “Zizians” are mostly now in jail or dead, but are there more?
BERKLEY, Maryland––Jack Amadeus “Ziz” LaSota, 34, also known as Andrea Phelps, Michelle Jacqueline “Jamie” Zajko, 32, and Daniel Arthur Blank, 26, “persons of interest” in connection with six murders linked to a transexual vegan cult originating in Berkeley, California, were apprehended on February 16, 2025 in Alleghany County, Maryland.
LaSota, identified at booking as a resident of Berkley, Maryland, 180 miles east of the arrest site, was charged with misdemeanor possession of a handgun in a vehicle, trespassing, and obstructing and hindering law enforcement.
Zajko and Blank, who was declared a missing person in 2022 in Media, Pennsylvania, are apparently facing similar charges.
None of the three, as yet, are charged with murder, but members of the cult, called “Zizians” by some former associates, are implicated in two killings each in California, Pennsylvania, and Vermont.
“Arrested in white box trucks”
LaSota, Zajko, and Blank “were arrested in white box trucks on private property, according to charging documents,” reported Peter D’Auria and Alan J. Keays of Vermont Digger.
The trucks match the description of trucks the “Zizians” earlier used as residences in Vallejo, California.
“According to charging documents obtained by Vermont Digger,” D’Auria and Keays wrote, “a Frostburg resident contacted Maryland state police around 3:30 p.m. Sunday,” February 16, 2025, “to report two white box trucks with chains on their tires trespassing on his property.
“The three people inside the trucks had asked if they could camp at the site for a month, according to the charging documents, but the landowner told police the people ‘appeared suspicious’ and he wanted them off his property.”
District Attorney’s Office photo)
Gun belts with ammo
The Maryland State Police promptly responded, with personnel from Allegany County Sheriff’s Office and Maryland Department of Natural Resources joining as backup.
Maryland state trooper Brandon Jeffries reportedly found Blank in the front seat of one of the box trucks while the other members of law enforcement “found Zajko and LaSota, according to the charging documents, dressed all in black and wearing gun belts with ammunition,” D’Auria and Keays recounted.
“According to Jeffries’ account,” D’Auria and Keays continued, “state police found a Sig Sauer handgun in Zajko’s front waistband, the charging documents said.
“Jeffries wrote that he had also seen a long rifle in the back of the vehicle and a handgun on the front floorboard where LaSota was sitting.”
Busted together before
“Sunday’s arrest was not the first time Zajko, LaSota and Blank have all been detained together by law enforcement,” D’Auria and Keays mentioned. “In January 2023, Pennsylvania State Police arrested the trio at a Chester, Pennsylvania, hotel, as part of a state police investigation into the homicide of Rita and Richard Zajko,” ages 69 and 71, respectively, parents of Michelle Jacqueline “Jamie” Zajko.
Charged with disorderly conduct and obstruction, LaSota posted the $10,000 bail and vanished for more than two years.
The son of University of Alaska at Fairbanks faculty member Dan Lasota, described on university staff pages as “our go-to person for all things related to research on artificial intelligence in education,” Jack LaSota “ left Fairbanks to become a graduate student studying computer hardware engineering in San Francisco, before dropping out of college to pursue game development,” summarized Suzanne Downing for MustReadAlaska.com.
Warning of the perceived dangers of artificial intelligence became an obsession of Jack LaSota.
Beginnings of the cult
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.
LaSota and Danielson 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, 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 on Lind’s property in small box trucks, possibly the same ones they were living in when arrested in Maryland.
“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.
(Solano County District Attorney’s Office photo)
Jack LaSota faked his own death
Eventually, on November 15, 2019, LaSota and transgender associates Alexander “Somni” Leatham, Amir “Emma” Borhanian, and Gwen Danielson disrupted a Center for Applied Rationality retreat near Occidental, California.
Charged with conspiracy, obstructing a police officer, and wearing masks for an unlawful purpose, LaSota, Borhanian, and Danielson delayed their prosecution by a variety of stratagems.
Finally, 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 to have been witnesses to LaSota falling from one of his boats and disappearing.
An obituary published in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and on Legacy.com mentioned that LaSota loved animals, one of the few published mentions of animals in connection with LaSota, despite LaSota’s vehement veganism.
Shootout at the not okay corral
Meanwhile back in Vallejo, Lind, then 80, began packing a pistol after a dispute with the “Zizians” over unpaid rent.
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 another “Zizian,” Alexander 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.
Law enforcement during the ensuing investigation discovered that LaSota was “alive and well.”
The Zajko & Lind murders
A little over six weeks after that, on the last day of 2022, one day before Michelle “Jamie” Zajko turned 30, Richard Zajko and Jamie Zajko were shot dead in their Chester Heights home, west of Philadelphia, leading to the apprehensions of Zajko, LaSota, and Blank on January 13, 2023 at the Candlewood Suites hotel in Chester, Pennsylvania.
All three were eventually released, keeping low profiles for the next year and a half.
Back in California, on January 16, 2025, the San Francisco Chronicle team recounted, “a Solano County prosecutor pleaded with a judge to push the case against Leatham and Suri Dao toward trial, explaining that the key eyewitness, Curtis Lind, was now 82 years old with a fading memory.”
Leatham and Dao potentially faced the death penalty.
The next day, however, January 17, 2025, “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.
Shootout near the border
“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.
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.
Gun had history
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.
Youngblut was 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.”
The gun Youngblut used “has been linked to the Dec. 31, 2022, killings of Richard and Rita Zajko in Pennsylvania,” according to CBS News.
(See also “Zizian” transexual vegan alleged murder cult may be a first in crime history.)
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