Vegan computer savants with Bay Area ties linked to deaths across U.S., authorities say

“We talked a lot, and I thought we were good friends,” Lind said in a 2024 interview with The Times. “They were going to stay at my yard for four months.”

That’s not what happened. The pandemic hit. The tenants, according to Lind, stopped paying rent. And in 2022, when Lind, then 80, tried to evict them, some of those same tenants staged a brutal attack, slashing his body and stabbing out an eye, according to a criminal complaint filed by Solano County prosecutors. With a samurai sword still lodged in his body, Lind whipped out a gun and shot back, wounding one tenant and killing another.

And then, the story really took a turn.

Because as horror-movie Gothic as a samurai sword attack on an octogenarian in a desolate corner of the San Francisco Bay might sound, it was only the first in a series of alleged violent crimes that law enforcement authorities have linked to members of the strange group Lind had welcomed into his motley community.

Over the past few years, several members of the group have been investigated, criminally charged or deemed persons of interest in incidents that resulted in six deaths across the U.S. The parents of one of the vegan associates, Michelle Zajko, were slain in the dark of night in their stately home in suburban Pennsylvania in late December 2022. Zajko, who authorities allege had a pistol similar to the one used in the crime, has been named a person of interest in their deaths. She has not been charged.

Last month, a Border Patrol agent was shot to death on a snowy Vermont highway during a shootout with two other associates of the group, Felix “Ophelia” Bauckholt, a German national, and computer science student Teresa Youngblut, 21. Bauckholt was also killed in the shootout, and Youngblut arrested.

And then there was Lind: He had survived the samurai attack and loss of an eye, and was preparing to testify against the tenants charged in his assault. But three days before the Vermont shootout, Lind was knifed to death in broad daylight outside his Vallejo lot. Another person with links to the group, Maximilian Snyder, a graduate of an elite Seattle prep school, was charged with Lind’s murder and trying to silence a witness. Snyder has not yet entered a plea.

Authorities in jurisdictions across the country have said little about the group or what evidence they have gathered in the far-flung cases. But court records, blog posts and interviews with family members and acquaintances paint a picture of a group whose members splintered from the Bay Area’s rationalist community — an intellectual movement exploring the underpinnings of human reasoning — and allegedly turned violent.

In the Bay Area’s rationalist community, they are known as the Zizians, a reference to Jack “Ziz” LaSota, a trans woman whose prolific blogging attracted a following. Many of her adherents attended fancy schools, are gifted with computers and worry about the dangers of artificial intelligence. They were often seen dressed all in black, or sometimes, wearing almost nothing at all.

By many accounts, the origins of the group go back almost a decade, to the time when LaSota, a computer science graduate from Alaska, landed in the Bay Area.

LaSota, who is now 34 and uses feminine pronouns, would at one point be declared lost at sea, then turn up very much alive near the scene of violent crimes on both coasts. She has not been charged in any of the killings.

But this was well in the future. In 2016, she was, as she wrote in her blog, hoping to “contribute to saving the world.” It was rough going. She was fired from a job at a gaming startup and struggled to afford Bay Area housing.

She eventually landed on unemployment, according to her blog, and developed a kinship with another trans computer whiz, Gwen Danielson, who was affiliated with the Berkeley-based Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a nonprofit focused on safe development of artificial intelligence.

Danielson, who comes from a family of engineers and intellects, had gotten a full-ride scholarship to Rice University. Her father, Brett, said she was working on three degree programs — neuroscience, neurological engineering and electrical engineering — but dropped out after a year and a half.

“There was something really deep I hadn’t had before in being able to just think and bounce ideas off someone equally interested in schemes to save the world for weeks on end,” LaSota wrote of Danielson.

LaSota also began to believe, according to her blog, that the astronomically high housing prices in the Bay Area were an impediment to “anyone who wanted to actually try to save the world.”

The friends hit on an elegant answer: They hatched a plan to acquire old boats and use them for housing. They called it “The Rationalist Fleet.” Brett Danielson, Gwen’s father, said he allowed his daughter, LaSota and a third person to join his cellphone plan so they could run their operations.

In 2017, LaSota, Danielson and others acquired a World War II-era tugboat, the Caleb, and sailed it down from Alaska to Half Moon Bay.

The group grew to include Emma Borhanian, a talented programmer who had moved from North Carolina to San Francisco for a job at Google. After rising in the ranks, her mother wrote on social media, Borhanian “retired” in her mid-20s and dedicated her life to “animal rights, transgender rights and AI safety.”

But the dream of building a utopian community of rationalist boat dwellers did not come to fruition, Brett Danielson said, in part because another member of the partnership with deeper pockets left. Also: maintaining old boats to the satisfaction of local authorities is really hard.

Almost immediately, the Caleb was in trouble with the law, according to San Mateo County public records. In October 2017, Coast Guard officials warned Gwen Danielson of the environmental dangers posed by the boat, noting it had “around 3,000 gallons of diesel fuel on board along with other hazardous petroleum products.” Two weeks later, the Coast Guard declared the boat “an imminent threat to the public health or welfare of the environment.”

As the group struggled to sort out their boat troubles, LaSota’s blog posts — dense pronouncements on rational decision-making meshed with earnest personal stories — drew in more followers. She eventually broke off from the larger rationalist community, penning posts critical of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and the Center for Applied Rationality.

In 2019, LaSota, Danielson, Borhanian and one other member of the group took this philosophical rift to the redwood forests of western Sonoma County. On the afternoon of Nov. 15, according to law enforcement reports, sheriff’s deputies got a call about a group of people dressed in black robes and Guy Fawkes masks outside Westminster Woods, a retreat center where the Center for Applied Rationality was holding a gathering. According to local news accounts, the robed intruders passed out fliers asserting the center “no longer aspires to teach the true path of rationality, if it ever did.”

The four were arrested on multiple charges, including trespassing and wearing a mask while committing a crime.

Brett Danielson said he maintained only sporadic communication with his daughter, but he did hear from her after the arrest. He said his daughter told him the group had been peaceful, and alleged abuse at the hands of authorities. The group later filed a federal civil rights lawsuit over the incident.

He feared his daughter was going down a dangerous path. Nevertheless, he helped pay her legal bills and hoped the trouble would pass.

It was around this time that some members of the larger rationalist community began to raise alarms.

“The purpose of this document is to warn you not to join them!” one person wrote on a site called Zizians.info. “Ziz is a master manipulator; she is extremely skilled at selling people on nonsense ideas about decision theory and ethics that defy not just the ‘rules of rationality’ but basic common sense.”

As their cases moved through Sonoma County courts, the group’s boat in Half Moon Bay continued to generate conflict with authorities. As it happened, one of their neighbors in the harbor, Lind, was familiar with the Caleb.

“It used to belong to one of my best friends,” said Lind, who had a long history of acquiring old boats.

Lind could sympathize with their regulatory troubles. Over the years he had faced his own issues because of his devotion to dilapidated vessels from bygone eras. He had recently been embroiled in a dispute with officials over the MS Aurora, a 70-year-old cruise ship that had been an inspiration for the TV show “The Love Boat.” “It’s a sickness,” he told The Times of his love for old ships.

When Lind sold his own boat, the Robert Gray, a 120-foot Army Corps survey boat, and moved to his trailer lot in Vallejo, the Zizians came along, moving into box trucks and trailers. But the harmony of their communal solution to the housing crisis was soon replaced by acrimony, especially as the unpaid rent began to accrue.

“We were all concerned about it,” said Lind’s good friend, Thomas Young, who lived with Lind on the Robert Gray.

Young said he dined with Lind at least once a week, and his troublesome tenants were a frequent topic.

“They did all kinds of things to be unpleasant,” Young said, adding that Lind believed they threw rocks at his trailer in the middle of the night to disturb him, and also “would parade around during the day, half naked, just to shock the neighborhood more than anything. He just wanted them out.”

But with the pandemic raging, no one was going anywhere.

Meanwhile, Danielson, at that point the registered owner of the Caleb, was under increasing pressure to relocate the listing tugboat. In May 2022, shortly after group members stopped responding to authorities’ entreaties, the boat sank.

And then another shocking development: In August of that year, Borhanian and a companion placed urgent calls for help, saying LaSota had fallen off another boat into San Francisco Bay and disappeared into the watery depths. Rescue teams searched and found no trace of her.

“Jack Amadeus LaSota left our lives but not our hearts on Aug. 19 after a boating accident. Loving adventure, friends and family, music, blueberries, biking, computer games and animals, you are missed,” read the obituary in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.

Around the same time, Danielson, too, went missing.

In fall 2022, with the pandemic waning, Lind got a judge to issue an eviction notice for his tenants.

“The court awarded me some $60-odd thousand,” he recalled in a 2024 interview with The Times. “I didn’t think they had any money, so I didn’t go after that. But I could kick them out for non-payment.”

A week before the sheriff was scheduled to come, Lind said, his tenants asked if they could stay for two more months. “I told them ‘No.’”

He had a bad feeling about it, he said, and so he began carrying a gun.

Around 2 a.m. on Nov. 13, 2022, another friend of Lind’s, Patrick McMillan, who also lived at his property, was inside his own trailer when he saw someone outside wearing a headlamp, he would later tell police.

Knowing of the dispute with the Zizian tenants, McMillan said he called Lind. Lind asked him to call police, according to an account filed in court by prosecutors. McMillan called 911, according to the account, but police did not come.

Hours later, around sunrise, McMillan told authorities, he was rousted from his bed by Lind’s panicked screams. McMillan said he opened his door and beheld Lind holding a gun and bleeding from multiple wounds.

His tenants had stabbed him, he later told The Times, echoing allegations prosecutors would bring in a criminal complaint, so “I pulled out this pistol and started shooting.”

Police did respond this time. Borhanian had been fatally shot. Another group member, Alex “Somni” Leatham, was wounded but survived. A third person, identified as Suri Dao in court papers, was on scene, but not wounded.

Police arrested Leatham and Dao and charged them with assaulting Lind. They also charged them with the felony murder of Borhanian, though Lind had shot her, because of their role in the attack.

From behind bars, Leatham has repeatedly written to the court professing innocence. Dao’s attorney, Brian Ford, told The Times that the “trial hasn’t happened yet. When it does, and all the evidence is presented, when the dust settles, everyone is going to realize Suri is not overly involved in any of this.”

There was someone else on scene the night Lind was stabbed: LaSota. Not dead after all. The revelation came in court papers filed by an attorney in the Sonoma County case.

Lind did not name LaSota as one of the tenants involved in the attack. She was not charged.

Less than two months later, the parents of Zizian associate Michelle Zajko were murdered on the other side of the country.

Rita Zajko, 69, and Richard Zajko, 72, were discovered shot in their bedroom in suburban Philadelphia on Jan. 2, 2023.

A subsequent police investigation, detailed by the Boston Globe, revealed that two people had parked a car in the couple’s driveway just before midnight on New Year’s Eve. At some point, according to footage from a Ring camera, someone shouted “Mom.”

An investigation into their deaths led Pennsylvania state troopers to the Candlewood Suites in nearby Chester City on Jan. 12, 2023. Michelle Zajko was staying there, and authorities were searching for the gun used to kill her parents, according to court testimony.

Instead, while searching a second room associated with Zajko, they found LaSota. In an affidavit, State Trooper Matthew Smith, using male pronouns, said LaSota “immediately became limp, closed his eyes, and refused to comply with any commands.”

LaSota, who Smith said is 6-foot-2 and around 200 pounds, was physically carried into a nearby hospital, where a doctor said there was nothing medically wrong. Yet, according to Smith, LaSota would not “open his eyes, walk, or move on his own or make any verbal announcements.”

LaSota was charged with disorderly conduct. After being released, she failed to appear for a court hearing, according to the Delaware County district attorney’s office. A warrant was issued, but once again, LaSota was gone.

Meanwhile, back in the Bay Area, Dao and Leatham, the two charged with stabbing Lind, were giving California officials all manner of trouble.

Leatham was accused of trying to escape from custody twice, on Nov. 28, 2022, and again on Feb. 6, 2023, according to court documents. Dao was accused of trying to escape in the summer of 2023.

As authorities on both coasts worked their cases, Brett Danielson said he heard from his daughter Gwen for the first time in years.

“‘I’m in hiding; I’m under an alias, please don’t divulge where I am, or that I’m even alive,’” he said she told him.

Lind, meanwhile, was trying to move on with his life. He had children, grandchildren and a host of friends who were helping him recover. And prosecutors were counting on him to provide crucial testimony in the case against his former tenants.

Lind and his supporters were anxious to put the episode behind them. Young said that after the sword attack, he had entered the tenants’ trucks and found dozens of computers, all expertly encrypted. “I’m an engineer,” Young said. “I can recognize the high level of skill these people had.”

On Jan. 16, Solano County prosecutors asked the court to speed up the trial date, noting that Lind was 82.

The next day, a man dressed in black and purple accosted Lind outside his Vallejo property and cut his throat as neighbors watched in horror. The old ship captain was dead. The man who killed him fled on foot.

Young said he is convinced someone wanted to keep Lind from testifying. He said he called and emailed Vallejo police, informing them that he still had all those computers and hard drives the tenants had left behind. Perhaps they would prove useful in figuring out who these people were.

But no one got back to him, he said. It wasn’t until late February, after he complained to local media, he said, that the district attorney’s office called.

On Jan. 14, a hotel employee in Vermont called law enforcement to report that two young people had checked into the hotel and were acting oddly — wearing black tactical-style clothing and carrying a gun.

Investigators spoke briefly with the pair, whom they identified as Youngblut and Bauckholt, who claimed they were in the area to look at property, according to a law enforcement affidavit filed in federal court.

On the afternoon of Jan. 20, Border Patrol agents pulled the pair over as they drove along Interstate 91 in a Prius. Youngblut, the driver, allegedly drew a handgun and fired, according to the affidavit. In the subsequent exchange of fire, both Bauckholt and Border Patrol Agent David Maland were killed. Maland, 44, was an avid outdoorsman and engaged to be married, according to his obituary.

Four days later, Vallejo police arrested Snyder outside a shopping mall near Interstate 5. He was charged with Lind’s murder.

Police have not said publicly how Snyder came onto their radar. But public records from the state of Washington provide a clue: Months earlier, Snyder and Youngblut had applied for a marriage license. It’s unclear if they ever married.

And there were more threads: Zajko had purchased the firearms that Youngblut and Bauckholt used during the shootout, according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court in Vermont.

Last week, authorities caught up with her, too. According to a statement from the Maryland State Police, Zajko was arrested Feb. 16, along with LaSota and a third person, Daniel Blank.

A property owner in Frostburg, Md., had contacted authorities to say three people with two box trucks were trespassing on his property, according to a law enforcement affidavit. They dressed all in black and “appeared suspicious.”

When police got there, according to the affidavit, they found Zajko with a SIG Sauer handgun in her waistband. There was another gun in one of the trucks. All three were charged with trespassing and obstructing a police officer. Zajko and LaSota were additionally held on gun charges.

They pleaded not guilty at a hearing on Tuesday, and are being held without bail.

Lind’s friends are still trying to wrap their heads around it all.

They remember Lind for his delightful eccentricities — living on ancient boats, jousting with authorities, befriending wild geese. And they remember him for his warmth. He loved his family. He made friends wherever he went, and he inherently trusted everyone he met.

In the end, they said, that may have been his downfall.