Possible Suicide Cluster Linked to Zizian Group, on Top of Killings
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With more stories emerging of individuals whose lives were impacted by the so-called Zizian cult in the Bay Area and beyond, it’s become clear that there were more victims besides the six people who were killed at the hands of group members.
The Chronicle reports on two instances of mental breakdowns by individuals who became heavily involved in the Berkeley-based rationalist movement, and two cases of suicide which had direct links to the Zizians. More on this in a moment.
There have been only a few reports in the last month from court appearances by members of the group we’re calling the Zizians, who all seem to have been in the thrall of the writings and beliefs of a trans woman named Ziz, birth name Jack Amadeus LaSota.
As we know, six people are dead due to violence attributed to or very likely linked to LaSota and her acolytes, who all believe in an offshoot philosophy of rationalism that fears a coming end to humanity at the hands of AI, adheres to a strict vegan lifestyle, and believes that the hemispheres of the human brain are gendered and can be in conflict with each other.
Here in the Bay Area, the first death that brought the group onto our radar was the brutal stabbing of 82-year-old Curtis Lind in Vallejo, on January 17. 22-year-old Maximilian Snyder, who has distanced himself from the group but is nonetheless linked to it, is in jail in Solano County charged with Lind’s murder.
Lind had been the landlord for members of the group, including LaSota, who lived out of two box trucks on his property from 2019 until November 2022, when three group members — Emma Borhanian, Alexander “Somni” Leatham, and Suri Dao — allegedly attacked him with knives and a samurai sword, impaling him through the chest and stabbing out one of his eyes. Lind fatally shot Borhanian while defending himself, and Leatham and Dao remain in jail for his attempted murder, and the murder of Borhanian.
Three days later, across the country in northern Vermont, two other people linked to LaSota and the Zizians, 21-year-old Teresa Youngblut and 28-year-old Ophelia Bauckholt, engaged two US Border Patrol agents in a shootout during a traffic stop. Bauckholt died in that shootout, while Youngblut sustained injuries, and she stands accused of the murder of Border Patrol Agend David Maland.
Additionally, on or around December 31, 2022, the parents of another group member, 32-year-old Michelle Zajko, were mysteriously murdered in their home outside of Philadelphia, and no one has yet been charged with their killing.
Zajko, who remains jailed along with LaSota and another group memer, Daniel Blank, in Allegany County, Maryland, wrote an “open letter to the world” from jail, some of the contents of which were published last month by the Associated Press. Zajko insists that press reports about her and her friends have been inaccurate, that she did not kill her parents, and she says that Snyder is not part of their group.
“My friends and I are being described as like Satan’s lapdogs, the devil & the Manson family all rolled into one,” Zajko writes. “My friends and I certainly don’t call ourselves ‘Zizians.'” Still, she says, Ziz “saved my life,” and “I’ve never seen her do an evil thing.”
“Ziz is not my leader, & I am not her’s. What we have is called friendship, and I love her infinitely more than I could ever express,” Zajko writes.
Also, like LaSota and Leatham similarly have done in court appearances, Zajko complained in her letter about not being fed a sufficient vegan diet while in jail.
The Chronicle’s reporting team that has continued digging into the Zizians, and reports on how rationalist ideas have pushed at least two people — who may or may not have been psychologically vulnerable to begin with — to have psychotic breaks or mental collapses. (Says one individual who chose to remain anonymous after being imprisoned for an assault that took place during one such mental break, “There’s inherent stress in concluding that humanity is heading toward an apocalypse that will kill everyone you care about.”)
They’ve also now uncovered more about the story of a young trans woman from Poland, Maia Pasek, whose name had been mentioned in multiple rationalist forums as being a victim of Ziz and her teachings. Pasek took her own life in March 2018, jumping off a building in her native Krakow, about two months after coming out as transgender, and a year after traveling to the Bay Area to attend a rationalist conference put on by CFAR (the Center for Applied Rationality).
Pasek’s girlfriend, who had moved with her to the Canary Islands in 2017 ostensibly to start their own rationalist movement, tells the Chronicle that her suicide was likely spurred by a confluence of factors, including her overall mental state. But LaSota had been in significant contact with Pasek, and had allegedly convinced her that her two brain hemispheres were split, one male and one female, and that her female half was suicidal due to her being trans.
Pasek, in one of her final writings in February 2018, wrote in a comment on LaSota’s blog that suicide was the “obvious choice” for “bearers of selfish utility functions who expect negative utility.”
Anna Salamon, the executive director of CFAR, has spoken about the terrifying chill she experienced in several interactions with LaSota, who she believed seemed dangerous. And, Salamon tells the Chronicle, “LaSota also bragged to me (my interpretation, I admit) that her theory must be cool because it had had a huge effect on her friend Chris/Maia Pasek. Namely, it had (according to LaSota) caused Pasek to kill themself.”
Salamon has admitted that rationalist meetups and the community she helped create had unwittingly created the perfect breeding ground for a cult. And she has referred to the followers of Ziz as “a number of smart, mostly autistic-ish transwomen who were extremely vulnerable and isolated,” and who were easily “manipulated” by her.
Content retrieved from: https://sfist.com/2025/05/21/possible-suicide-cluster-linked-to-zizian-group-on-top-of-killings/.
