The House in Vallejo

Just after 7 a.m., Patrick McMillan was inside his mobile home when his friend and landlord, Curtis Lind, appeared outside.

Something was terribly wrong.

Lind was covered in blood.

The tip of a samurai sword was protruding from his upper chest.

McMillan later testified that Lind told him people were trying to kill him. McMillan called 911 and told the dispatcher that Lind had been stabbed repeatedly and was bleeding badly.

Police were dispatched to the property at 7:24 a.m.

By the time officers arrived, the scene contained three critically wounded people—and the confrontation that produced those injuries would become the foundation of a murder prosecution.

Curtis Lind had met people from the Caleb years earlier at Pillar Point Harbor.

According to Lind's later account, the connection began because the tugboat kept dragging anchor. The Caleb needed another anchor, and Lind sold its crew one.

When Lind eventually retired from boating and moved to property he owned in Vallejo, several people from that circle followed.

Around the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Lind allowed members of the group to use RVs and park converted trucks on the property under an informal rental arrangement.

What was supposed to be temporary lasted much longer.

Lind later said rent payments stopped.

Eventually, he began trying to remove the tenants from the property.

By November 2022, the relationship between Lind and some of the people living on his property had deteriorated into an eviction battle.

Witnesses described trucks and trailers occupying the yard. Locks had allegedly been placed on spaces intended for other tenants. Lind wanted the occupants gone.

Prosecutors would later allege that on the morning of November 13, Suri Dao drew Lind toward the group's area of the property by telling him there was a water leak.

According to the prosecution's account, Lind was struck in the head and knocked down.

What allegedly happened next was extraordinary.

Prosecutors say Dao and Emma Borhanian attacked Lind with knives.

They allege Alexander “Somni” Leatham attacked him with a samurai sword.

The blade went through Lind's chest.

These details describe prosecutors' allegations in a criminal case; Dao and Leatham have not been convicted of those charges.

Emma Borhanian was 31 years old.

Three years earlier, she had stood beside LaSota, Gwen Danielson, and Alexander Leatham during the masked protest at Westminster Woods.

Now she was lying dead at the Vallejo property.

Authorities determined that Lind had shot Borhanian during the violent confrontation. Prosecutors treated Lind's gunfire as self-defense rather than charging him with her death.

California's felony-murder doctrine would instead become part of the prosecution's case against the surviving defendants: prosecutors alleged that Dao and Leatham were legally responsible for Borhanian's death because it occurred during their alleged attack on Lind.

Dao and Leatham have contested the criminal case against them.

Prosecutors say the attack was planned.

Their theory is that Dao used a supposed water leak to lure Lind into position before he was struck, stabbed and impaled.

But people associated with the defendants have disputed that account.

An alternative version circulated online claiming that Lind had harassed or threatened the tenants and that he—not they—initiated the confrontation.

That account has not been independently verified.

What is not disputed is the physical aftermath:

Curtis Lind survived.

Alexander Leatham survived.

Emma Borhanian did not.

And Suri Dao and Leatham would remain at the center of the criminal case that followed.

When police arrived after the attack, they encountered another person associated with the circle.

According to WIRED's reconstruction of police records, that person gave officers the name Julia Dawson.

Police took Dawson to the station for questioning.

Then something happened.

Dawson appeared to suffer a medical emergency and was transported to a hospital.

From there, Dawson left.

At that moment, investigators apparently did not understand the significance of the person who had just disappeared from the hospital.

Two days later, they did

Jack “Ziz” LaSota had not suddenly appeared in Vallejo.

Years earlier, LaSota had been part of the Bay Area rationalist world — an online and in-person community where people debated artificial intelligence, existential risk, decision theory, and how rational thought could be used to shape the future.

LaSota had written online about effective altruism, AI risk, psychology, gender, morality, and increasingly unconventional theories about human behavior.

Over time, LaSota and several people in the same orbit broke away from established rationalist organizations.

Outsiders within that community eventually began referring to them by a name derived from LaSota’s chosen name:

The Zizians.

The label would follow them long after those online arguments stopped being merely online.

The photograph freezes the group at an important moment.

November 2019.

Before the killings. Before the disappearances. Before investigators in multiple states would begin encountering some of the same names.

At Westminster Woods, Jack LaSota, Gwen Danielson, Emma Borhanian, and Alexander Leatham had arrived together for a protest targeting the Center for Applied Rationality.

According to later reporting by WIRED, all four had connections to the rationalist, effective-altruist, and AI-risk communities. Their dispute with parts of that world had already grown increasingly hostile online before the confrontation at Westminster Woods.

Following the arrests, the four faced criminal charges and years of legal disputes.

But the group did not simply disappear after 2019.

Their paths continued.

And eventually, those paths would lead somewhere far darker.

By 2022, the story had moved to Vallejo, California.

Emma Borhanian and Alexander Leatham—the two people pictured along the bottom row of that 2019 booking-photo composite—were living on property owned by an older man named Curtis Lind.

Lind had previously allowed members of the group to stay on his property.

But the relationship deteriorated.

According to later court testimony and reporting, a dispute developed over the property and money. Then, on November 13, 2022, the conflict exploded into violence.

Lind would later describe being confronted outside his home.

What followed involved a handgun, knives, and a sword.

When it was over, Emma Borhanian was dead.

Alexander Leatham had been shot.

And Curtis Lind had suffered catastrophic injuries—but survived.

More than two years had passed since Curtis Lind survived the attack in Vallejo.

The criminal case against Alexander Leatham and Suri Dao was moving toward trial.

Lind was now 82 years old.

And he mattered enormously to the prosecution.

He was the surviving victim.

He was the eyewitness.

He was expected to testify.

Then, on January 17, 2025, Curtis Lind was attacked again.

This time, he did not survive.

By this point, the story no longer followed a straight line.

It crossed states. It crossed years. And the same small circle of names kept resurfacing around violence, investigations, arrests, and deaths.

Some knew one another personally. Others had encountered one another through the internet.

What connected them was not a conventional organization with membership cards, headquarters, or a public leader.

It was something far stranger: a network formed through online communities, shared ideas, personal relationships, and an ideology that outsiders would eventually associate with one name.

Ziz.

But understanding why investigators and journalists kept encountering that name requires going backward — before the killings, before the arrests, and before most people had any idea this world existed.

Years before the names in this story became associated with killings and criminal investigations, they were connected to a much quieter world.

Online discussions about artificial intelligence. Rationalism. Ethics. Decision-making. The future of humanity.

These were communities built around questions most people never spend much time thinking about.

But somewhere inside that world, Jack LaSota began developing ideas of their own.

LaSota wrote online under the name “Ziz.”

The writings explored consciousness, morality, identity, artificial intelligence, and theories about how the human mind operates.

Over time, a small group of people became closely associated with LaSota.

Outsiders would eventually give them another name:

the Zizians.

Months before the Vallejo attack, Jack LaSota had seemingly vanished.

On August 19, 2022, the Coast Guard received a report that LaSota had fallen overboard in San Francisco Bay without a life preserver.

An extensive search followed.

After approximately 18 hours, the Coast Guard suspended the operation without finding LaSota.

More than two weeks later, an obituary appeared.

Then came November.

After the violent attack on Curtis Lind in Vallejo, investigators encountered a person identifying herself as Julia Dawson.

According to Coast Guard records later obtained by WIRED, Vallejo police contacted the Coast Guard with an extraordinary update:

LaSota was alive.

Police said the person who had identified herself as Julia Dawson was Jack LaSota.

While California authorities dealt with the aftermath of the Vallejo attack, another branch of this network stretched across the country.

Michelle Zajko had become associated with LaSota's circle.

Her parents, Richard and Rita Zajko, lived in Pennsylvania.

Before long, their names would become part of this story too.

Not because of an online argument.

Not because of a protest.

Because both of them would be found dead.

Look at where the trail has taken us already.

California: a masked protest, an apparent disappearance, a sword attack, a dead woman, a surviving witness—and eventually that witness's murder.

Pennsylvania: two parents shot dead inside another unresolved homicide investigation.

The incidents were separated by geography and circumstance.

It would be irresponsible to pretend that every person in this network was responsible for every crime connected to it.

But investigators were beginning to encounter relationships that crossed those state lines.

And the next major event would make those connections impossible to examine one state at a time.

Curtis Lind's murder did not close this story.

It opened another door.

Three days later—on a highway in northern Vermont—a Border Patrol agent stopped a Toyota Prius.

Inside were two young people.

Investigators had already been watching them.

There were firearms in the vehicle.

Within minutes, two people would be dead.

And when federal investigators began examining the people, weapons, and relationships surrounding that shooting, names from other parts of this Rabbit Hole would surface again.