Suspect In Vallejo Murder Distances Himself From ‘Zizian’ Cult, Suggests He Is Primarily Motivated By Veganism
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It may not get us any further in understanding actual motive in the case of a January murder in Vallejo, but we now have an extended statement from the suspect in the case.
The 22-year-old man accused of slitting the throat of a 82-year-old Vallejo man who had been the landlord of several members of a rationalist splinter group that has recently gained attention as a possible cult won’t admit his links to the group, and seems to want to distance himself from them. But he had a long message to deliver to one of the recognized leaders of the rationalist community about the moral necessity of a vegan lifestyle.
In a lengthy letter dictated to a journalist last week, we get the first clues into the motivations of Maximillian Snyder, who was arrested shortly after the January 17 killing of Curtis Lind. Witnesses described seeing Snyder, dressed in black, lurking on the cul de sac where Lind lived for days before the attack. And one day after the district attorney made a statement about Lind’s upcoming testimony in a trial stemming from a previous attack on him by alleged cult members, Snyder allegedly stabbed and killed him.
Lind had previously been stabbed, and impaled with a sword, in November 2022, when three individuals who have been associated with the “Zizians,” who had been living on his property in box trucks, rent-free, for two years, allegedly attacked him. Lind had a gun and fatally shot one of the attackers, 31-year-old Emma Borhanian. The other two suspects, Alexander “Somni” Leatham and Suri Dao, remain in jail in Solano County charged with the attempted murder of Lind and the murder of Borhanian.
Leatham and Borhanian had previously been arrested in the fall of 2019 in Sonoma County along with two others, Jack “Ziz” LaSota and Gwen Danielson, for protesting outside of an event hosted by the Berkeley-based Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) — one of a couple of organizations that are part of the rationalist sphere in the Bay Area, and which figure heavily in the online writings of LaSota, Danielson, and Leatham.
The letter that Snyder dictated to the Chronicle from jail was addressed to Eliezer Yudkowsky, a figure who also comes up often in the group’s writings, who co-founded the Berkeley-based Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI). And while Snyder claims in the letter not to be a “friend” of Ziz, Snyder seems deeply interested in getting Yudkowsky, and by extension others in the rationalist community, to listen to him — and he speaks in the same verbose, intense, moralistic manner that is found in the writings of Ziz/LaSota, Danielson, and others in the group.
It is the writing of a highly intelligent, arguably mentally unhinged, and very passionate person.
Content retrieved from: https://sfist.com/2025/02/11/suspect-in-vallejo-murder-distances-himself-from-zizian-cult-suggests-he-is-primarily-motivated-by-veganism/.
