Member Of Zizians Transgender Vegan Death Cult Charged With Murder Of Her Parents
Michelle 'Jamie' Zajko did not act alone, prosecutor says
Delaware County District Attorney Tanner Rouse has charged Michelle ‘Jamie’ Zajko in the New Years Eve murders of her mother and father, Rita and Richard Zajko. Both were shot to death in Michelle’s childhood bedroom.
Rouse says that the identity of Zajko’s co-conspirator has not been established yet. However, “we are very certain that Michelle Zajko was in the home and arranged for the death of her parents,” Rouse told a press conference.
After a years-long, exhaustive investigation, Rouse has been convinced by “phone analysis”. Out of habit, Zajko allegedly analyzed the “f**k-ups” the conspirators had committed during their crimes, leaving traces of the conspiracy Rouse can show a jury.
“This included not getting rid of the shell casings found at the scene. This included not getting rid of the ammunition that was later recovered from her Vermont home that matched … the shell casings found at the scene”, Rouse explained.
The conspirators had failed to use a complex deception plan involving burner phones and fake text messages from a conspirator left behind at the scene. The evidence of a conspiracy was overwhelming. “We are finally at the point where we can say beyond any doubt that Michelle Zajko was at least in part responsible for the death of her parents.”
Rita and Richard Zajko were both shot in the head at close range, surrounded by Michelle’s childhood dolls and toys. A neighbor’s doorbell camera recorded two people arriving in a vehicle at the residence in Chester Heights, then voices shouting “Mom!” and “Oh my God! Oh, God, God!”
Zajko is already charged with providing the gun that her fellow cult member Theresa Youngblut used to kill a Border Patrol officer in a shootout on Inauguration Day in 2025. Another member of the group, Felix ‘Ophelia’ Bauckholt, was killed in that shootout.
According to NBC News, when Pennsylvania state troopers encountered Zajko ten days after the murders, she fled the scene, abandoning her vehicle and $40,000 stashed inside it. Troopers also encountered LaSota, who bizarrely played dead and escaped custody at the hospital hours later.
Zajko was finally arrested with Jack ‘Ziz’ LaSota, the leader of the ‘Zizians’ transgender vegan death cult, in February 2025. Both were initially charged with trespassing and weapons possession in Frostburg, Maryland. They have pleaded not guilty to all charges.
LaSota’s attorneys deny any such group as the ‘Zizians’ exists. Zajko has claimed that she was arrested with LaSota to prevent the exoneration of Youngblut, who could face the death penalty. The Zizians do not want to be called “a cult”, but also insist there is a conspiracy against them as a group.
Six homicides, one cult
“You, the public, are being lied to”, Zajko wrote in a 20-page handwritten “Open Letter to the World” that her attorney provided to the Associated Press in April 2026. “And while I don’t promise to answer all your questions, I think the truth about my friends and I will make a lot more sense than what you’ve been reading about in the papers.”
“My friends and I are being described as like Satan’s lapdogs, the devil & the Manson family all rolled into one,” she wrote, denying charges no one has levied against her. “These papers are flagrantly lying. For instance, there were no truck-fulls of guns, no machine gun, & I didn’t murder my parents.”
Zajko denies any connection with Maximilian Snyder, who is charged with killing a witness against the group, their former landlord Curtis Lind, in California. Snyder had applied for a marriage license with Youngblut, who allegedly killed a Border Patrol officer in Vermont.
Zajko had been estranged from her family in the year before the murder of her parents. Her association with LaSota began in the Berkeley, California rationalist community. Breaking from that movement over the perceived doomsday of artificial intelligence, the Zizians tried living according to their libertarian ethos.
In 2017, he convinced some friends to help him buy the Caleb, a 94-foot tugboat, and sail her to the San Francisco Bay area. His plan was to live ‘anchor-out,’ away from shore, rent-free, “escaping the burdens of society” while they pondered the saving of the planet from the ravages of AI.
San Mateo County Harbor District has already tried to sue LaSota, Danielson, and the other owners for as much as $100,000 in towing and cleaning fees for the abandoned tugboat. LaSota faked his own death in August 2022 by pretending to fall into San Francisco harbor.
When the Caleb had gotten too expensive, Danielson came up with the idea for “stealth RVs,” box trucks with solar panels on the roof, a tiny apartment inside, “plus extra items like a water-purification system, ‘yeast algae and bacteria bioreactors to create food’ and ‘materials for aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation.’” Group members allegedly walked around the storage lot nude.
Curtis Lind rented lot space to the Zizians to park their stealth RVs. When he evicted them for nonpayment, three members of the group allegedly ambushed and assaulted him with samurai swords. Lind was blinded in one eye and stabbed.
Using a pistol, Lind shot and killed Emir ‘Emma’ Borhanian in self-defense. LaSota was found at the scene, supposedly dead. He was not arrested, as his involvement was not apparent at the time.
Lind also wounded Alexander “Somni Logencia” Leatham, who awaits trial for his role in Borhanian’s death. A second attack by Snyder, Youngblut’s prospective marriage partner, allegedly succeeded in killing Lind, who was set to testify against his attackers.
Kill your family, save the planet
While veganism is not a violent dietary practice, an extreme diet was one of the control techniques Jack LaSota reportedly used as ‘Ziz’. He also used extreme sleep deprivation on the theory that a tired brain brought internal selves into creative conflict. The two techniques were reinforcing, as a malnourished brain is a vulnerable mind.
Through his blog, LaSota also taught his followers that transgender brains are especially gifted at hosting this conflict of the internal self. LaSota believed he was able to harness the dissonance for mental innovations that would save the world from AI. This is not a normal or usual belief among the trans-identified.
Furthermore, not everyone in the Zizians group identifies as transgender, though many do. Daniel Blank, who was arrested with LaSota and Zajko, does not seem to identify as transgender. The press refers to him with male pronouns.
Blank’s father “noticed a change in his son when he visited that Thanksgiving [in 2022], recalling a rare disagreement during a shopping trip, when the father purchased non-vegan food.”
“He was really looking down at me,” Alexander Blank said. “Not that he actually violently argued, but he said, ‘You shouldn’t do that, animals have the same rights as humans.’”
The ‘cult’ aspect in this story is Daniel Blank cutting off his family over veganism, not his private adoption of a vegan diet. Blank’s beliefs evidently led him to disapprove of his father’s morality and cut him off, behavior consistent with conversion to a cult.
In his ‘Sinceriously’ blog, LaSota described “breaking up” with his family, which he denounced as a source of emotional and human attachments that were “not agentic”, conflicting with his desire for “strict consequentialist optimization”. The traditional, biological family was holding LaSota back from realizing his radical ideals.
Definitions are always contested in these stories. The media understandably wants to avoid sensationalizing the sensational, so headlines generally refer to the Zizians as “cult-like” rather than a cult.
The transgenderism in LaSota’s anti-family ideology also goes unexamined by press outlets. Helpfully, the Zizians are all different from one another, and the confusion makes it easier to dodge this implication.
Pronoun rules
Blank and Zajko do not appear to have adopted a cross-sex identity, and the press consistently refers to them with correctly-sexed pronouns.
Tessa Berns, previously reported and even indicted as Suri Dao, was the third group member involved in the sword assault on Lind. Berns now identifies as “trans nonbinary” using they/them pronouns. The media landscape obliges her.
Maximilian Snyder, who allegedly murdered Curtis Lind, the sole witness to his own attempted murder in 2022, helpfully uses “any pronouns.” The media has defaulted to male ones.
Theresa ‘Milo’ Youngblut, the woman arrested in the killing of Border Patrol Agent David Maland on Inauguration Day, is “she/her” in all press coverage despite having adopted a masculine name.
Borhanian, the man Lind killed in self-defense, and Bauckholt, the man killed in Vermont, both identified as transgender, and both have been awarded posthumous female pronouns by a compliant press.
Jack LaSota has grown large breasts, apparently due to hormones. Media outlets all use female pronouns for LaSota.
The upshot of all this confusion is that the role of transgender ideation gets minimized or ignored in most coverage of the story of the Zizians. Their coherence as a cult becomes questionable rather than clarified, so that the murders of Rita and Richard Zajko lose sense and meaning.
We need to talk about why these kids were not alright.
How Does The Press Determine Which Pronouns To Use For A Transgender Killer?
During February, we finally got to see the interrogation video of Julia Egler. She was interviewed wearing a Tyvek ‘paper suit’ because her clothing had been taken for evidentiary analysis. Egler allegedly killed her mother and her mother’s boyfriend because she felt “misgendered”. No greater crime exists in the magical world of gender identity.