A Solano County Superior Court judge has consolidated the trials and set an October trial date for two followers of the cult-like Zizian group who are charged with a November 2022 murder and attempted murder in Vallejo.
During a proceeding Friday in Department 22 in Fairfield, Judge John B. Ellis not only consolidated the trials of Suri Dao, 24, and Alexander Jeffrey Leatham, 30, a transgender woman. The judge also set a so-called “PC 995” hearing to consider a defense motion to dismiss one or more counts at 8:30 a.m. Aug. 22. The motion will be heard by Judge Daniel Healy in Department 2 in the Justice Building in Vallejo.
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But on the same day, court records indicate, Ellis will consider a motion at 1:30 p.m. in Department 22 in Fairfield to transfer Dao, a state prison inmate, to Solano County Jail.
Additionally, Ellis will hear a pretrial request, aka an in limine motion, to exclude specific evidence or arguments from being heard at trial, during hearing set for 8:30 a.m. Sept. 16 in Department 23 in the Justice Building in Vallejo.
Ellis on Friday set the pair’s jury trial, expected to take five weeks, for 8:30 a.m. Oct. 21 in Department 23.
San Francisco-based criminal defense attorney Brian Ford represents Dao, and Alternate Public Defender Carol Long represents Leatham. Deputy District Attorney Ilana Shapiro, who late last year secured guilty verdicts during the Quintanilla siblings’ murder trial, leads the prosecution.
In previous court hearings, Leatham interrupted the proceedings with outbursts, forcing Ellis to order bailiffs to confine her to an isolation booth with a window, just off the courtroom, where she could see and hear the proceedings but not disrupt them.
Dao, in previous hearings, has appeared via a remote video links.
Prosecutors filed the case Nov. 15, 2022, two days after they allege Dao and Leatham attempted to kill Curtis Allen Lind in Vallejo. Lind shot two of his attackers that day, at his Third Street property, wounding one and killing 31-year-old Emma Borhanian, court records indicate.
The DA’s complaint charges Dao and Leatham for Borhanian’s death; the attempted murder of Lind; and aggravated mayhem while using a knife, or sword, to attack and injure Lind. The charges are coupled with several enhancements, including great bodily injury on a victim 70 years or older, and inflicting great bodily injury or using a firearm.
Shapiro filed an amended complaint on March 5, citing “allegations and aggravating factors,” including references to any crimes previously committed by the defendants, which may affect sentencing.
The case took a unexpected turn five months ago, when fellow Zizian Maximilian Bentley Snyder, 23, of Washington state, was accused of killing Lind, 82, on Jan. 17 at his property in Vallejo. Lind was set to testify in the pending trial for Dao and Leatham when he was shot to death.
Snyder has pleaded not guilty and faces a readiness conference and a preliminary hearing setting at 8:30 a.m. June 16 in Department 23 in the Justice Building in Vallejo. He is represented by Vallejo attorney Terry A. Ray.
The Zizians are linked to six deaths across the U.S., including the killing of a U.S. Border Patrol agent, the Associated Press has reported previously.
In the wooded outskirts of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a perplexed landlord noticed odd sights at two of his rental properties. Tenants wore long black coats and parked box trucks outside the duplexes. They ran an electrical cord from one box truck into one of the condos, and kept a stretcher inside another.
A neighbor remembers similarly dressed figures walking around at night holding hands. They never spoke a word.
By the time the FBI searched the property in February, one of the most recent tenants had been killed in a shootout with U.S. Border Patrol agents in Vermont, and a second was under arrest. A third, a shadowy figure known online as “Ziz,” remained missing for a time after authorities linked their cultlike group to six deaths in three states.
Officials have offered few details of the cross-country investigation, which broke open after the Jan. 20 shooting death of a Border Patrol trooper in Vermont during a traffic stop.
AP interviews and a review of court records and online postings tell the story of how a group of young, highly intelligent computer scientists, most of them in their 20s and 30s, met online, shared anarchist beliefs, and became increasingly violent.
Their goals aren’t clear, but online writings span topics from radical veganism to gender identity to artificial intelligence.
At the middle of it all is “Ziz,” who appears to be the leader of the strange group, who called themselves “Zizians.” She has been seen near multiple crime scenes and has connections to various suspects.
She was even declared dead for a time, before reappearing amid more violence.
Ziz, investigators say is Jack Amadeus LaSota, who moved to the San Francisco Bay Area after earning a computer science degree from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 2013 and interning at NASA, according to a profile on a hiring site for programmers, coders and other freelance workers. At the time, NASA officials did not respond to a request to confirm LaSota’s internship, but a Jack LaSota is listed on a website about past interns.
In 2016, she began publishing a dark and rambling blog under the name Ziz, describing her theory that the two hemispheres of the brain could hold separate values and genders and “often desire to kill each other.”
LaSota used she/her pronouns, and in her writings says she is a transgender woman. She railed against perceived enemies, including so-called rationalist groups, which operate mostly online and seek to understand human cognition through reason and knowledge. Some are concerned with the potential dangers of artificial intelligence.
LaSota began promoting an extreme mix of rationalism, ethical veganism, anarchism and other value systems, said Jessica Taylor, an AI researcher who met LaSota both in person and online through the rationalist community and knew her as Ziz.
When LaSota left the rationalists behind, she took with her a group of “extremely vulnerable and isolated” followers, Anna Salamon, executive director of the Center for Applied Rationality, told the San Francisco Chronicle.
Taylor said Ziz adherents use the rationalist ideology as a reason to commit violence. “Stuff like, thinking it’s reasonable to avoid paying rent and defend oneself from being evicted,” she said.
LaSota has not responded to multiple AP emails, and her attorney, Daniel McGarrigle, declined to comment when asked whether she is connected to any of the deaths.
A Washington state woman linked to Snyder was ordered held without bail in January in connection with the death of the Border Patrol agent, as the case grew to encompass killings in multiple states.
According to a Jan. 30 AP report, Teresa Youngblut, who is in her early 20s, faces federal firearms charges in the Jan. 20 death of Agent David Maland. She’s accused of opening fire on agents during a traffic stop in northern Vermont, sparking a shootout that also left her companion, Felix Bauckholt, dead.
Pennsylvania state police said on Jan. 29 that the gun used in the Vermont shooting was purchased by a person of interest in the Dec. 31, 2022, killings of Richard and Rita Zajko, who were shot to death in their Chester Heights home. Both Youngblut and the buyer were in frequent contact with someone who was detained as part of the Pennsylvania investigation and is a person of interest in the Vallejo killing of Lind, U.S. Attorney Michael Drescher said in a court filing.
In the meantime, police and court records have shed some light on the connections, according to the AP.
LaSota is currently facing charges of obstructing law enforcement and disorderly conduct in Pennsylvania. Authorities did not indicate whether those charges are related to the Zajko deaths, but court records show that police were searching for a gun used in two killings when they arrested LaSota 12 days later at a hotel about 10 miles from the scene of the killings.
LaSota also has connections to some of the key players in the Vallejo case, investigators say.
In 2019, LaSota and three others were arrested while protesting an event hosted by the Center for Applied Rationality at a camping retreat in Occidental, in Sonoma County, according to a San Francisco Chronicle report. In 2022, two of the others, Borhanian and Leatham, were accused of using a sword to attack Lind.
In November, someone with the same name as Maximilian Snyder applied for a marriage license with a Teresa Youngblut in Kirkland.
LaSota may have been present during the 2022 landlord attack, according to court documents that also suggest LaSota had been falsely reported dead three months earlier.
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