Jack “Ziz” LaSota, the alleged leader of the Zizian “murder cult” and two others, 26-year-old Daniel Blank and 32-year-old Michelle Zajko, were arrested in Allegany County, Maryland in connection with six killings. They were ordered held without bail on charges including trespassing, obstructing and hindering and possession of a handgun in a vehicle.
LaSota, 34, who is transgender and identifies as a woman, “appears to be the leader of an extremist group known as Zizians,” according to Maryland prosecutors. The group is suspected in the murder of a California woman in November 2022, another stabbing death in California in January 2023, the December 2022 deaths of both of Zajko’s parents in Pennsylvania, and the killing of U.S. Border Patrol Agent David Maland and a car passenger during a shootout near the Canadian border in Vermont in January 2025.
The three suspects had been detained by police in Philadelphia in January 2023 in relation to the killings of Zajko’s parents. LaSota and Blank were charged with obstruction. LaSota also charged with resisting arrest. Blank was not charged. LaSota was released on bail five months later and never appeared for any subsequent court dates.
According to The Guardian, the trio was arrested after someone reported three “suspicious” people on his property. Upon their arrest, police reportedly found them dressed in black, with two of them wearing gun belts holding ammunition. The third, Zajko, refused to put her hands behind her back and was found to have a handgun on her. Police also found a rifle in the back and a handgun on the front floorboard of one their trucks.
The Associated Press reports…
Officials have offered few details of the cross-country investigation, which broke open after the Jan. 20 shooting death of Maland. Associated Press 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.
Allegany County State’s Attorney James Elliott said LaSota has faked her own death in the past. In the summer of 2022, the U.S. Coast Guard responded to reports that LaSota had fallen into the San Francisco Bay and an obituary was published. Elliott also stated that two guns Zajko purchased were recovered in connection with the shooting death of Chris Maland in Vermont.
Several members of the Zizians, which have been referred to as a “murder cult” or “death cult,” lived on a property in Vallejo, California, that was owned by Curtis Lind. Lind is the person who was allegedly stabbed to death by members of the group. Lind was set to testify against some of the group’s members at the time of his death.