According to Vallejo, CA police, 22-year-old Maximilian Bentley Snyder has been charged in the stabbing that occurred on Jan. 17.
Maryland State police have arrested two people linked to what has been described as a transgender vegan anti-artificial intelligence murder cult in connection with a string of homicides nationally, including several deaths in California, two in Pennsylvania, and the shooting of a U.S. border patrol agent in Vermont earlier this year.
Jack "Ziz" Lasota, 34, and Michelle Zajko, 32, were taken into custody. Authorities believe Zajko supplied the guns used in the shooting of Border Patrol agent David Maland near the Canadian border on Jan. 20. Maryland State Police confirmed the arrests Monday but declined to comment further.
A third person, Daniel Blank, 26, was arrested alongside Zajko and Lasota; his connection was not immediately clear. Maryland authorities did not immediately disclose the circumstances under which the three were arrested.
"The Maryland State Police is working in coordination with our federal law enforcement partners and the Office of the State's Attorney in Allegany County as this investigation continues," a spokesperson for the Maryland State Police said in a statement.
LaSota is the alleged leader of the Zizians cult, a Bay Area-based group that advocates for veganism and is concerned about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence. Many in the Zizians cult had previously worked at NASA and Google, the San Franciso Chronicle reported.
Here's what to know about the Zizians, the alleged murders, and Lasota.
What are the Zizians accused of doing?
The criminal cases around the Zizians have drawn worldwide attention, in part because some of the people involved were transgender and many were vegan, an unusual combination of circumstances, experts said.
Zajko is a suspect in the shooting deaths of her parents in Pennsylvania in late 2023. Authorities believe Lasota is the leader of a small group of people that included Michelle Youngblut, 21, who was charged in connection with Maland's death. Police had interviewed Lasota and Zajko in connection with her parents' deaths, but they were not arrested or charged.
"There's significant evidence that Jack Lasota is the person who is the idea engine for these people," said Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow and policy adviser at the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism. "There are certainly suspicions that need to be investigated."
A man Youngblut grew up with and got a license to marry, Max Snyder, 22, is jailed in California on charges he in January ambushed and mortally stabbed a landlord who owned the property where Lasota and others lived several years ago.
Group members attacked the landlord in 2022 with swords, and he shot two of them in self-defense, killing one, court records show.
Though investigations have not yet publicly announced the specific connection between the deaths, court records, and interviews indicate members of the group had lived in box trucks in California and North Carolina and operated like a small religious group calling themselves "Zizians," a reference to Lasota's preferred name.
Jessica Taylor, who is friends with several of the people involved, said she worried that the group had become a "death cult" or a "murder gang" over their adherence to a moral code at odds with mainstream laws and behavior, including strict veganism.
"You're talking about being willing to kill people who they think are bad," said Taylor, who briefly dated a German national, Ophelia Backholt, who was killed in the Jan. 20 shootout between Youngblut and the Border Patrol.
Poulomi Saha, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies the behavior of groups that mainstream Americans would consider cults, said groups like the Zizians are hard for many to understand. She said members "live" online, making it hard for the public or even law enforcement to track their shift from talk to action.
"The internet culture and the absolute immersion that's possible there means there are forms of connection that only appear only after the fact," said Saha, who has been following the cases. "We are kind of grasping for a story that makes sense of it. ... People on the outside can never fully know what's happening on the inside."
Who is Jack 'Ziz' Lasota?
Jack "Ziz" LaSota, who grew up in Alaska and is a former tech worker who uses feminine pronouns, is the alleged leader of a group of computer whizzes, bloggers, and vegans centered in the Bay Area that some have dubbed the "Zizians" and likened to a cult, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. LaSota once lived in Berkeley, Vallejo, and Half Moon Bay in the Bay Area.
As with similar groups, Poulomi Saha, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies the behavior of groups that mainstream Americans would consider cults, said she suspects the Zizians fell under the sway of a charismatic leader who persuaded followers to do things they ordinarily wouldn't do. In participating in those extreme acts, Saha said, people fall victim to a group psychology that permits and encourages more extreme behavior.
According to LaSota's online writings and Chronicle reporting, LaSota developed a theory that the brain's two hemispheres could hold separate values and genders and "often desire to kill each other." LaSota believed transgender women were naturally gifted. LaSota has also written about improving human cognition and the dangers of artificial intelligence.
Lasota may have faked her own death. Lasota's hometown newspaper published an obituary for her in 2022. Court records show Jack "Ziz" Amadeus LaSota was declared dead by a judge more than two years ago after she allegedly fell from a boat overboard into the San Francisco Bay.