Who Are the Zizians? Radical Trans 'Cult' With Ties to Border Agent Killing

The recent killing of a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Vermont is reportedly linked to a purported "death cult" made up of radical, highly-educated, vegan and transgender members known as the "Zizians."

The group is said to revolve around Ziz, who is a transgender woman. Ziz, whose legal name is Jack LaSota, garnered a following online after posting about her ethical and social theories on her blog, Sinceriously.

This was how Felix "Ophelia" Baukholt, the German national involved in the shooting last week, discovered LaSota, Baukholt's friend Jessica Taylor told Newsweek.

"She was interested in things like effective altruism (& criticisms of it), ethics, ethical veganism, mathematics, decision theory...a lot of the same topics as Ziz, and she had similar views on a number of things," Taylor said of Baukholt.

Taylor posted on X, formerly Twitter, after hearing of the shooting, saying that she knew Baukholt and calling out the "Zizians."

Baukholt, who was also a transgender woman, was fatally shot on January 20 after she and another individual, identified as Teresa Youngblut, engaged in a shootout with Border Patrol agents. Agent David Maland was killed in the gunfight after he and other agents pulled the pair over in a traffic stop.

After Baukholt was identified by authorities and Taylor realized it was her friend who had been killed, she thought LaSota might have been involved, given her friend's fondness for the blogger and the "pattern of violence" that she said matched up to what she knew of the group. She posted on X, formerly Twitter, after hearing of the shooting, saying that she knew Baukholt.

"I remember warning Ophelia that Zizians were a death cult with a high local death rate..." Taylor wrote.

Taylor, who said she had not spoken to Baukholt since 2023, told Newsweek the group tended to choose victims of "petty authority"—like landlord or parent or, in this case, a Border Patrol agent—and that she and Baukholt had even previously discussed "the high death rate" around the Zizians.

"Because I had been familiar with the Ziz story for a while, I saw some possible connections before others did, and was trying to prove it by looking at people's social media profiles and so on," Taylor said.

U.S. Customs and Border Patrol referred Newsweek to the U.S. Attorney's Office of Vermont for comment. The U.S. Attorney's Office of Vermont declined Newsweek's request for comment, citing policies on open investigations.

The guns used by Baukholt, an-award winning youth math genius from Germany, and Youngblut, a computer science student at the University of Washington, have since been determined as belonging to a person of interest in other murders. That individual has been identified by Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives authorities as bioinformatics researcher Michelle Zajko.

Among the possibly connected killings is the murder of Curtis Lind, a landlord in Vallejo, California, who was stabbed to death three days before the Vermont shooting. His killing came just before he was scheduled to testify in a case pertaining to a violent 2022 incident on his property. Two years ago, Lind was stabbed and blinded with a samurai sword by two individuals, who were allegedly tenants and who had allegedly stopped paying him rent. Lind shot his attackers, killing one of them.

On Tuesday, Maximillian Snyder, a 22-year-old data scientist, was charged in the killing of Lind. Snyder and Youngblut applied for a marriage license in Washington in November, according to police and court records obtained by Open Vallejo.

Lind and Maland's deaths come two years after Zajko's parents, Richard and Rita Zajko, were found dead in their Delaware County, Pennsylvania, home in January 2023.

"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," SFist, a local San Francisco outlet reported last week.

"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."

Taylor told Newsweek she believes the FBI is looking into the Zizian group.

In a statement shared with Newsweek, the FBI said, "As stated in open court and in court filings, Teresa Youngblut is believed to have associations with other individuals suspected of violent acts in multiple states, to include Pennsylvania and California."

"The FBI is coordinating information sharing on any case related details with our partners from various law enforcement agencies to effectively follow every lead and aggressively investigate these connections," the FBI said. "As part of the continuous dialogue with those partners, especially following an assault on a law enforcement officer, the FBI routinely shares appropriate law enforcement information about potential persons of interest to enhance officer safety and situational awareness."

"As this is an ongoing investigation, the FBI cannot comment further on any additional details not included in the court filings," the agency said. FBI Albany is running the investigation into the shooting in Vermont.

At the time of the Vermont shooting, Taylor said she was not aware that her friend was in touch with LaSota. She said while the patterns matched up with what she knew of the group, "I don't think they set out to shoot a border patrol officer."

"[I] had no idea where she was," Taylor said of Baukholt. "I think they were planning something, some hotel people were suspicious so police investigated, then things went wrong."

Aella, who says she is a sex worker and researcher and claims to know several people involved or adjacent to the Zizians, said on X that the group's activities date back to 2019. That is when she says that LaSota and another member, Gwen Danielson, were banned from an alumni reunion for the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR), a Berkley-based nonprofit focused on behavioral psychology and AI.

In response to the ban, the pair and two others allegedly protested the event by blocking the entrance and exit while dressed in black robes and Guy Fawkes masks. All four of the individuals were believed to be transgender women.

Amid the protest, police received a report suggesting that one of the protesters was carrying a gun, which prompted heavy police response, including a SWAT team and helicopter. The group was ultimately not armed but the individuals were arrested on suspicion of felony child endangerment, false imprisonment and conspiracy as well as misdemeanor counts of resisting arrest, wearing a mask while committing a crime and trespassing, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

"Two of the individuals involved in this blockade had been asked not to attend our event as a result of prior erratic behavior towards our staff and others," CFAR said in a statement at the time. "Unfortunately, they instead took actions which disrupted things both for our guests and everyone else present at the camp."

Taylor said while it seems LaSota is recruiting transgender members who might be financially vulnerable and ripe for radicalization, she believes most of the members are acting on their own accord and are just being persuaded to join the group.

Starting in 2021, LaSota reportedly advocated the killing of various people and the punishment of "non-good" people, like non-vegans, according to Aella. Both LaSota and Danielson allegedly faked their own deaths in 2022. An obituary for LaSota was published on September 7, 2022, claiming that they died in a boating accident. But on January 13, 2023, LaSota was arrested in Pennsylvania for "obstructing administration of law" and "disorderly conduct." LaSota made bail in June and stopped showing up to court.

"We still don't know the whereabouts of the people in this story who aren't either dead or in custody, and we sort of expect them to continue doing murders," Aella posted Wednesday.