6 Deaths, 3 States and the Radical Breakaway ‘Rationalists’ at the Center of the Nightmare
There is an unpaved road near the edge of a woods outside the tiny Appalachian town of Frostburg, Maryland. That is where two white box trucks, the kind one might rent to move houses, were parked on Sunday, Feb. 16, when a fleet of officers from the Maryland State Police, the Allegany County Sheriff’s Office, and the Department of Natural Resources Police descended.
In the cab of one of the trucks, Maryland State Trooper Brandon Jeffries would later recall in court records obtained by Rolling Stone, he found a young man dressed all in black. The windows of the second truck were fogged over, but when Jeffries unlatched the back door, he discovered two other individuals, similarly clad in black and wearing holsters stocked with ammunition.
Outside the truck, the trooper told the trio they were trespassing. They said they understood, and promised to leave. But first, they would have to give their names. They refused.
A search of the truck subsequently turned up two firearms, a long rifle and handgun. Officers would discover a third — a fully loaded Sig Sauer P365 pistol — tucked in the waistband of one of the three as she resisted being handcuffed.
An FBI agent would later confirm their identities: Daniel Blank, 26, Michelle Zajko, 33, and 34-year-old Jack Amadeus LaSota, who uses feminine pronouns. Online and in certain Bay Area circles LaSota is known as “Ziz,” a charismatic figure who gained a following blogging about her pseudoscientific theories about brain function, her pop culture-inflected ideas about morality, and her efforts to live by the principles espoused by certain thinkers in the Bay Area’s eclectic “rationalist” scene.
The three had been detained together before, two years earlier and more than 200 miles away, at a motel in Chester, Pennsylvania, in January 2023. Pennsylvania State Police were executing a warrant, seeking DNA and a gun belonging to Zajko, as part of their investigation into the murder of her parents, two weeks earlier on New Year’s Eve. In the process of detaining Zajko and her then-roommate, Blank, police discovered LaSota — previously missing and, at one time, presumed dead — on the floor of the Candlewood Suites bathroom. Her eyes were closed, and she was nonresponsive, but apparently alive.
None of the three have been charged in connection to the Pennsylvania double homicide. Blank and Zajko — both of whom remain “persons of interest” in the murders today, according to records — were quickly released in 2023. LaSota was charged with disorderly conduct and obstructing or hindering police, and held for several months before she was released. Within the year, all three would disappear: Blank was reported missing in April, and in December of that year, LaSota failed to appear at a hearing for her trial in Pennsylvania.
Locating the three of them became a more urgent matter for law enforcement as questions arose regarding possible connections to other, more recent murders: the violent stabbing of an octogenarian landlord in Vallejo, California, on Jan. 17, and a traffic stop turned firefight that claimed the lives of a border patrol agent and a 28-year-old quant trader in Coventry, Vermont, three days later.
“All of the subjects involved are to be questioned regarding other crimes that have occurred across the country,” the Maryland incident report stated. (The Allegany County public defender representing LaSota, Zajko, and Blank did not respond to requests for comment from Rolling Stone.)
After their arrest in Maryland last week, all three were charged with trespassing and obstructing and hindering police activity, both misdemeanors. LaSota and Zajko were each additionally charged with misdemeanor firearm offenses, and Zajko was charged with resisting arrest. All three are currently being held without bond in Maryland, but prosecutors alleged in court last Tuesday they are part of an “extremist group.”
Becoming Ziz
For some individuals who became acquainted with Ziz during the time she spent living in and around the Bay Area, news of her detention came as a relief. For years, members of the rationalist community had warned that she was dangerous. As one pseudonymous poster wrote in a lengthy post in 2020, “Ziz is a master manipulator; she is extremely skilled at selling people on nonsense ideas about decision theory and ethics that defy not just the ‘rules of rationality,’ but basic common sense.”
That writer coined the term “Zizians,” but it’s not clear that Ziz or any of the other half-dozen individuals currently detained in connection with the string of violent incidents that have unfolded across the country would describe themselves that way. Many are fiercely committed vegans; a number are trans or otherwise gender fluid; almost all of them have been recognized for their academic or intellectual achievement; and at least two were reported missing by their families. All are deeply invested in ideas advanced by the “rationalist” movement.
The “rationalist” community — both the online version and the IRL one, largely concentrated in Berkeley, California — grew out of a pair of mid-aughts blogs, “Overcoming Bias” and “LessWrong,” which were concerned with improving one’s decision-making abilities. Optimizing. “Winning.” An early rallying cry, made by LessWrong’s founder and most prolific poster, Eliezer Yudkowsky, discussed the idea of “raising the sanity waterline” — something members of the community believed would naturally happen if everyone applied rationalist principles in their own lives.
The concept of “effective altruism,” promoted by the billion-dollar crypto ponzi artist Sam Bankman-Fried, came out of the rationalist world. These ideas also attracted a large number of individuals who were concerned with the existential threat posed by artificial intelligence, and were determined to systematically identify and address those risks in hope of staving off disaster. (The romance between Elon Musk and the singer Grimes blossomed over a play on words referencing a LessWrong post about the threat of sentient AI.)
Today, someone who self-identifies as a “rationalist” might belong to any of three offshoots concerned with self-improvement, effective altruism, or AI risk. Ziz, one person who knew her told me, was right at the intersection of all three.
Before she adopted female pronouns and the name “Ziz,” LaSota was born in Alaska and studied computer science at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, eventually moving to the Bay Area in 2015 to be closer to the rationalist community, with designs on pursuing a career in the tech industry.
Like Bankman-Fried, LaSota, as she would later explain on her blog, pursued a tech career with the goal of “earning-to-give,” or securing a high-paying job, then donating the bulk of her salary toward the greater good. LaSota initially planned on giving to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, an organization founded by LessWrong’s Yudkowsky, devoted to managing existential risks posed by artificial intelligence. (Other major donors to the small nonprofit include PayPal founder Peter Thiel’s foundation and Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum.)
But LaSota’s tech career was short-lived. She chafed against the expectations that she would put in long hours at two different startups that hired her soon after she arrived in the Bay Area. At the first company, she wrote on her blog, “I walked out of the office after 8 hours of work. (They seemed upset, “where are you going?”, half an hour later calling me to say I was fired.)” At the second, she wrote, they “kept demanding that I work unpaid overtime, talking about how other employees just always put 40 hours on their timesheet no matter what… When I refused to work longer than 40 hours a week, they did not renew my 3 month contract.”
“I don’t think Jack LaSota made much of an impression,” one person who first met LaSota at the offices of MIRI and its sister organization, the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR), tells me. But that would soon change. Running out of money and anxious over the cost of housing in the notoriously expensive Bay Area, LaSota and an acquaintance from the scene, Gwen Danielson, another trans woman, came up with an idea of creating a flotilla that would function as rent-free housing for members of the rationalist community. They called it the “Rat Fleet.”
“LaSota was just some nerdy kid,” the person who knew her from MIRI recalls. But when the two met again, months later, everything seemed to have changed. “Ziz was someone who was dressing in these dark, ominous robes, and living on a tugboat in the harbor with other very weird people.”
The Rat Fleet
In July 2017, before she was Ziz, LaSota sent an email to the CFAR alumni listserv, seeking crew members to join her and Danielson on a voyage. The two of them and a third individual, Daniel Powell, had purchased a decommissioned Navy tugboat, the Caleb, located in Ketchikan, Alaska. They planned to sail it to Half Moon Bay, California, where they would anchor it outside the harbor to avoid paying for a slip.
“Crew with experience navigating the Inside Passage, operating a large vessel (>100 gross tons), or other relevant experience may be paid wages based on experience,” LaSota wrote. “Contact me if interested. Also, suggest names for a tugboat if you think you have a better name than Caleb.”
Actualizing their vision of the Rat Fleet ended up being considerably more difficult than they anticipated: According to a government lawsuit later filed against Danielson and another of the Caleb’s owners, officials with the U.S. Coast Guard and San Mateo Harbor District issued repeated warnings to the tugboat over environmental concerns — the boat had 3,000 gallons of diesel and other petroleum products on board that they worried might leak into the bay — and concerns for the safety of other boats in the harbor. On multiple occasions, the lawsuit alleges, the Caleb dragged its anchor, drifting in the direction of other vessels. Eventually, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, Curtis Lind, who was also living on a boat in the harbor at the time, offered to sell them a new anchor.
A person who visited the Caleb during this time tells me that LaSota and Danielson mentioned being hassled by authorities who seemed to think they were sovereign citizens, a largely right-wing movement whose adherents reject the idea that the government has any authority over them. “I didn’t quite get it at the time. I understand a lot better now: the thing that they were doing was sort of like a much, much, much, much smarter version of the sovereign citizen thing,” this person says.
Pursuing a life without a permanent address was one example of their efforts to live outside of society’s strictures, but there are others: faking their deaths in an effort to avoid criminal prosecution (as both Danielson and LaSota allegedly would); using alleged medical emergencies in an effort to escape from police custody (as LaSota is said to have done on at least two occasions — once successfully, and a second time unsuccessfully); and offering fake names to police (as prosecutors allege LaSota and one compatriot have done).
The boat, which LaSota eventually sold her share in for $1, and which Danielson ultimately abandoned, sank in the outer anchorage of Pillar Point Harbor in March 2022. It remains there to this day, partially submerged and posing “a danger to navigation, health, safety, and the environment,” according to lawyers for the San Mateo Harbor District, who have sued Danielson and Powell for the costs associated with removing the tugboat. In 2023, the court issued a default judgment declaring the abandoned boat “marine debris” and granting the Harbor District permission to remove it.
As the Rat Fleet was floundering, LaSota and her comrades were simultaneously growing disillusioned with two of the institutional centers of the rationalist community: MIRI and CFAR. On Nov. 15, 2019, LaSota, Danielson, and two other individuals — Emma Borhanian and Alex Leatham, who went by “Somni” — staged a protest outside of a Northern California retreat center where CFAR was holding an alumni reunion.
According to the police report, LaSota, Danielson, Borhanian, and Leatham arrived at the retreat center wearing black hooded robes, black gloves, and Guy Fawkes masks, and proceeded to block the property’s entrances and exits with their vehicles. One eyewitness recalls that the protesters refused to engage with staff or police, but they were determinedly foisting flyers that read “MIRICFAR betrayed us” on passersby.
Among other accusations, the flyers asserted that MIRI “paid out to blackmail using donor funds” — a reference to a protracted dispute with an ex-employee, and an allegation that MIRI denies.
The protesters were less concerned with the substance of the allegations made by that ex-employee, several people familiar explain, than they were with the fact that MIRI — which staked its credibility on promoting sound decision-making — would back down. In their view, this not only represented bad “decision theory,” but called the organization’s entire existence into question.
Ziz’s understanding of “decision theory” is drawn from Newcomb’s Paradox, a thought experiment popular with the LessWrong crowd, that originated with a theoretical physicist at Berkeley’s Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in the 1960s. It concerns a pair of boxes — a clear one with $1,000 in it, and an opaque one that either holds $1 million or nothing — whose contents are determined by an all-knowing, nearly infallible “predictor.” If the predictor believes you’ll choose either box, box B will be empty. If it predicts you will choose only B, B will contain $1 million. The catch is that the predictor bases its guess on its knowledge of you: If you are the type of person who would only choose the second box, that information factors into its prediction. By the protesters’ logic, MIRI would never have been “blackmailed” if it wasn’t the type of organization that could be “blackmailed” in the first place.
The protesters’ appearance — the robes, gloves, masks — and the fact that they wouldn’t respond to questions or commands, spooked staff at the retreat center, who called the police. The entire retreat center — which happened to be hosting a group of elementary-school-age students for a team-building exercise that day — was put on lockdown as helicopters, a SWAT team, and bomb squad swarmed the property.
LaSota, Danielson, Borhanian, and Leatham were arrested and initially charged with criminal conspiracy, trespassing, wearing a mask for an unlawful purpose, false imprisonment, resisting arrest, and child endangerment. (“The actions of the suspects created an emotional and mental suffering to several of the children who were visibly upset and distraught as a result of this incident,” the police report said.)
The subsequent criminal case — and a countersuit, alleging mistreatment at the hands of law enforcement during their detention — would drag on for years. Dan Kapelovitz, the lawyer who represented LaSota in her criminal case, was still fighting for video footage of her arrest, typically easy to obtain in situations like this one, when he was informed — erroneously, it would later turn out — that his client had died.
According to documents filed in San Mateo District Court, on the afternoon of Aug. 19, 2022, Ziz had taken Borhanian and Naomi LaSota, Ziz’s sister, out “for an afternoon on the water” aboard the Black Cygnet, a small sailboat LaSota purchased before the Caleb. But things took a turn around 11 p.m., as the three headed back toward the marina. “LaSota was working with the motor on the back of the boat and fell into the water out in the bay,” Borhanian wrote in a declaration attached to a petition intended to officially establish LaSota’s death. “I lost sight of Jack while looking for a life preserver.” The pair called the Coast Guard, which mounted an exhaustive search effort — involving a helicopter, a drone and several boats, lasting 28.5 hours covering an area of 167 nautical miles — before it was called off, unsuccessful.
LaSota’s family hired a probate lawyer to settle their child’s estate, and placed an obituary in their hometown newspaper, remembering LaSota’s love for “adventure, friends and family, music, blueberries, biking, computer games and animals.”
Believing his client to be dead, Kapelovitz formally requested to be let off the case, which he still believes would have eventually been dropped. (“The government had an extremely weak case,” he tells me.) But a few months later, Kapelovitz received a letter from the district attorney in Solano County, informing him that LaSota was alive, and had been in contact with police at a Vallejo property owned by Curtis Lind — the acquaintance from Pillar Point Harbor in Half Moon Bay who’d offered them a new anchor — after Lind was viciously attacked by several people.
Landlocked in Vallejo
In early 2020, as life on the tugboat was wearing on them, Lind reportedly offered Danielson and LaSota the opportunity to move to a piece of property he owned: a dusty parking lot at the end of a cul-de-sac in South Vallejo. The two of them and others, who would soon grow to number more than a dozen, began living in box trucks parked on the premises — a sort of landlocked version of the Rat Fleet. Among the residents at the property were two of the CFAR protesters — Leatham, who was employed by UC Berkeley at one point, and Borhanian, a former Google engineer — and a third person who reportedly used the name Silver-and-Ivory.
The the pandemic hit, and tenants at the property stopped paying rent. Lind eventually sought an eviction order against Danielson, LaSota (identified as “Ziz Doe” in court records), Borhanian, as well as 18 other named residents and “all unknown occupants.” The court declared those tenants owed Lind more than $60,000 back rent, damages, and other costs.
Lind was granted that judgment on Oct. 27, 2022. Two and half weeks later, two days before the sheriff was reportedly set to evict them, Lind was attacked. Patrick McMillian, who was living on the property, would later tell a local news station that Lind banged on his RV door, covered in blood, at 7:30 in the morning. “He said ‘I’m dying.’ I saw him with a sword sticking through his back and it came out his chest.”
Lind had fired on his attackers, killing one — Borhanian — and injuring Leatham. Leatham and the individual who went by Silver-and-Ivory at the property, but who gave police the name “Suri Dao,” were arrested. (While questions remain, prosecutors have since alleged that Dao is actually Tessa Berns, a 24-year-old former National Merit Scholar who once medaled in the Colorado state spelling bee.)
Leatham and Dao were charged with aggravated mayhem, Lind’s attempted murder, as well as Borhanian’s murder, under a California law that allows for a person to be charged if they provoke another person to commit a killing. Dao has pleaded not guilty. Dao’s lawyer did not respond to an inquiry from Rolling Stone. It’s not clear from available records if Leatham has entered a plea; the Solano County Alternate Public Defender, representing Leatham, did not respond to an inquiry about the case.
As the district attorney in Vallejo would later inform LaSota’s lawyer, LaSota was also apparently at the scene of the attack on Lind. Wired has reported that LaSota was taken to the police station for questioning that day, where she gave the name “Julia Dawson.” “Dawson” experienced an apparent medical episode, and was taken to a nearby hospital, before she disappeared.
Lind miraculously survived. The only eyewitness to his own assault, he was preparing to testify at a trial set to begin later this year, when he was attacked again on Jan. 17, 2025 — this time fatally.
The person arrested and charged with Lind’s murder is Maximillian Snyder, another National Merit Scholar and a graduate of Seattle’s prestigious Lakeside School, who also attended Oxford University and who was a poster on LessWrong. Snyder has not entered a plea in the case, but he did dictate a lengthy letter from jail, imploring Eliezer Yudkowsky — the founder of LessWrong and MIRI — to convert to veganism. In that letter, Snyder also sought to distance himself from Ziz, writing, “I am not one of Ziz’s friends. Neither she nor her friends endorse me or my words, so far as I know. I speak only for myself, as myself, for the sake of everyone.” (Snyder’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment.)
According to a federal complaint, three days after Lind’s murder, a 21-year-old woman named Teresa Youngblut abruptly opened fire on a border-patrol agent named David Maland, after Maland pulled over the Prius she was driving for an immigration check in Coventry, Vermont. A German-born quant trader and a trans woman known to the rationalist community as Ophelia Bauckholt, who was in the car with Youngblut, also drew a gun. Both Maland and Bauckholt were killed in the ensuing firefight, and Youngblut was injured.
Youngblut has pleaded not guilty to two federal charges, including assault of a border-patrol officer with a deadly weapon. (She is being represented by a federal public defender, who did not respond to a request for comment.) Two months before the shooting and stabbing incidents that took place more than 3,000 miles apart, the nonprofit newsroom OpenVallejo reported, Youngblut, who also attended Seattle’s Lakeside School, had applied for a marriage license with Maximillian Snyder in Washington state.
Last Tuesday, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms alleged another connection: the guns drawn by Youngblut and Bauckholt in the border patrol shootout Michelle Zajko, as well as the SigSauer found on Zajko at the time of her arrest in Maryland on Feb. 16, were all purchased by Zajko at the same Vermont gun shop a year earlier. (Zajko is accused by the ATF of using an address where she was no longer living on her application forms.) The same day, last Tuesday, there was a hearing in Maryland on the newest set of charges against Zajko, Blank and LaSota; in court, prosecutors shared that one of the two box trucks the trio were living in at the time of their arrest was registered to Youngblut.
At that hearing in Maryland last Tuesday, LaSota addressed the judge directly, insisting on her innocence. “I haven’t done anything wrong. I shouldn’t be here,” she reportedly said. “I wish I could be more eloquent. Maybe I could if the circumstances were better.” The judge appeared unmoved. All three are currently being held without bail.
