From the Los Angeles Times, February 23:
VALLEJO, Calif. — As he prepared to give up the beloved pre-WWII-era ship he lived on in Half Moon Bay and move into a trailer on a lot he owned in this scrappy city on San Pablo Bay, Curt Lind made a fateful decision.
Lind, then in his late 70s, invited an eccentric group of folks living on a neighboring vintage tugboat to come along and become his tenants.
The neighbors — a group of computer savants and vegan activists committed to the study of human cognition, most of them trans women — moved box trucks on his land. It seemed like a win-win for the free-spirited Lind: They needed a place to stay, and he had a dream of making a little money by transforming his ramshackle lot into cheap housing for artists, woodworkers and other “makers” who were being squeezed by Bay Area prices.
“We talked a lot, and I thought we were good friends,” Lind said in a 2024 interview with The Times. “They were going to stay at my yard for four months.”That’s not what happened. The pandemic hit. The tenants, according to Lind, stopped paying rent. And in 2022, when Lind, then 80, tried to evict them, some of those same tenants staged a brutal attack, slashing his body and stabbing out an eye, according to a criminal complaint filed by Solano County prosecutors. With a samurai sword still lodged in his body, Lind whipped out a gun and shot back, wounding one tenant and killing another.
And then, the story really took a turn.
Because as horror-movie Gothic as a samurai sword attack on an octogenarian in a desolate corner of the San Francisco Bay might sound, it was only the first in a series of alleged violent crimes that law enforcement authorities have linked to members of the strange group Lind had welcomed into his motley community.
Over the past few years, several members of the group have been investigated, criminally charged or deemed persons of interest in incidents that resulted in six deaths across the U.S. The parents of one of the vegan associates, Michelle Zajko, were slain in the dark of night in their stately home in suburban Pennsylvania in late December 2022. Zajko, who authorities allege had a pistol similar to the one used in the crime, has been named a person of interest in their deaths. She has not been charged.
Last month, a Border Patrol agent was shot to death on a snowy Vermont highway during a shootout with two other associates of the group, Felix “Ophelia” Bauckholt, a German national, and computer science student Teresa Youngblut, 21. Bauckholt was also killed in the shootout, and Youngblut arrested.
And then there was Lind: He had survived the samurai attack and loss of an eye, and was preparing to testify against the tenants charged in his assault. But three days before the Vermont shootout, Lind was knifed to death in broad daylight outside his Vallejo lot. Another person with links to the group, Maximilian Snyder, a graduate of an elite Seattle prep school, was charged with Lind’s murder and trying to silence a witness. Snyder has not yet entered a plea.
Authorities in jurisdictions across the country have said little about the group or what evidence they have gathered in the far-flung cases. But court records, blog posts and interviews with family members and acquaintances paint a picture of a group whose members splintered from the Bay Area’s rationalist community — an intellectual movement exploring the underpinnings of human reasoning — and allegedly turned violent.
In the Bay Area’s rationalist community, they are known as the Zizians, a reference to Jack “Ziz” LaSota, a trans woman whose prolific blogging attracted a following. Many of her adherents attended fancy schools, are gifted with computers and worry about the dangers of artificial intelligence. They were often seen dressed all in black, or sometimes, wearing almost nothing at all.
By many accounts, the origins of the group go back almost a decade, to the time when LaSota, a computer science graduate from Alaska, landed in the Bay Area.
LaSota, who is now 34 and uses feminine pronouns, would at one point be declared lost at sea, then turn up very much alive near the scene of violent crimes on both coasts. She has not been charged in any of the killings.
But this was well in the future. In 2016, she was, as she wrote in her blog, hoping to “contribute to saving the world.” It was rough going. She was fired from a job at a gaming startup and struggled to afford Bay Area housing....
....MUCH MORE
As always, keep an eye out for the bloggers.
OTOH, I'm not sure where this story leaves 'Cherchez la Femme'.
