Suspect and Possible Cult Member Makes Court Appearance In Vallejo Killing as Further Links Revealed to Other Murders
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We’ve only just begun to see the unraveling of the strange case of the Zizians, as we’ll call them for now, a purported “death cult” with links to the rationalist movement, whose alleged activities the last two years have led to a total of six deaths to date.
It appears to be a small group, highly educated, computer savvy, at times geographically scattered, and a number of them if not all of them appear to identify as trans or nonbinary — with their deadnames potentially being publicized widely as law enforcement releases information about the cases, as these are still their legal names. If we can call them a cult at all, they aren’t the type who all lived together on a compound for extended periods — though if they had a compound, it was a pair of box trucks parked for three years on Curtis Lind’s property on Lemon Street in Vallejo, a cul de sac in an industrial part of town.
Neighbors had seen the individuals walking around outside with gas masks, and they’d been seen walking in the nude as well. Otherwise they would be clad in black, and they’d been nicknamed “The Cult.”
It’s since come to light that they are all vegan, highly intellectual, concerned with the rise of artificial intelligence, and they were linked to a creepy protest action in Solano County in 2019 outside a retreat hosted by the Berkeley-based Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) — with whom they, or at least the group’s purported leader, has some previous ties.
Lind was killed earlier this month at age 82, three months before he was set to testify in the trial of two people who had allegedly attacked him with knives and a samurai sword in November 2022, causing him to lose an eye.
An Attack Spurred By a Threatened Eviction
The first of a series of deaths took place the night Lind was attacked. 31-year-old Emma Borhanian was fatally shot by Lind as he defended himself against — and two other members of the group, Alexander “Somni” Leatham and Suri Dao, have been in custody ever since for her murder, and the attempted murder of Lind. According to investigators, the trio lured Lind out of his trailer one night telling him there was a water leak, and they had planned to kill and dismember him and dissolve his body in a vat of chemicals that was already prepared.
It’s unclear if they also had plans to dispose of a witness on the property, another octogenarian who lived in a separate trailer, Patrick McMillan, who saw his friend Lind impaled through the chest with the sword. McMillan is now the sole surviving witness, though he was not an eyewitness to the initial attack.
McMillan told the media at the time that the group had discovered that Lind had called in the sheriff to evict them, after they had stopped paying rent on the property three years earlier — they were able to remain in part due to a pandemic eviction moratorium.
Content retrieved from: https://sfist.com/2025/01/29/suspect-and-possible-cult-member-makes-court-appearance-in-vallejo-killing-as-further-links-revealed-to-other-murders/.
