Zizians: The vegan trans ‘death cult’ turning geniuses into accused killers
Benedict Smith20 April 2025 11:00am BST
Curt Lind
He met the Zizians in early 2020 while the tug boat they were living on was docked at a harbour south of San Francisco, and offered to rent out his land to them.
They made a strange pairing – a former ship worker and talented machinist, then in his seventies, and a group of 20-somethings, most of them transgender vegans, who had attended elite universities. But they formed a sort of bond, and Lind would recall taking one of them to buy their first bra.
“Curt was open to different people’s ways of life,” said Jon Jenkins, who knew Lind for 20 years, recalling his friend speaking up for the group just months before they allegedly tried to kill him.
The Zizians are an offshoot from the “rationalist” intellectual movement in San Francisco’s Bay Area, which started taking root among its community of tech bros and computer geeks in the early 2010s.
The group took its name from its leader Ziz, real name Jack LaSota, who in labyrinthine blog posts would formulate a philosophy about the brain’s two hemispheres – which can be good or evil, male or female, and “often desire to kill each other”.
LaSota, who was born a man before transitioning, would dress up in long black “Sith” robes, after the Star Wars villains. “The Sith do what they want deep down,” he explained in one post. “They remove all obstructions.”
Anna Salamon, who founded a rationalist group in the Bay Area, later said she was “viscerally afraid of LaSota in a way I’ve never been viscerally afraid of anybody” and realised the group of young people she brought together could be radicalised by his violent ideology.
“We didn’t know this at the time, but in hindsight we were creating conditions for a cult,” she told NBC News.
After moving onto converted trucks on Lind’s land, the purported members were regarded with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion by neighbours. They were gaunt, pale, would never talk to or in front of strangers, and on several occasions were spotted walking around naked.
Trust is hard to find in that corner of Vallejo, where locals recall at least three bodies being dumped along the streets in recent years in cases not linked to the Zizians. Many repeat a warning not to hang around until it gets dark.
“The police don’t respond to anything. It’s kind of a lawless town,” claimed Kevin Lum, a shaven-headed mechanic who works at one of the many garages that line the road.
‘Relations soured’
The city went bankrupt a few years ago, and though it has clawed its way back to solvency, holes remain in vital services – including law enforcement, as police openly admit.
It might be just a half-hour drive from Napa Valley’s famous wine region, and the Napa River is a short walk from Lind’s trailer park, but Vallejo is a very different place. As dusk falls, sex workers wait on every corner of one of its main thoroughfares, Sonoma Boulevard.
Lind later said his relationship with the Zizians soured when they stopped paying rent as the Covid pandemic hit, and he was reportedly forced to go to court to get some $60,000 he was owed.
In November 2022, prosecutors said he was called out of his caravan by Suri Dao, one of the members of the “death cult”, who told him there was a water leak in their truck. On the way out, he grabbed a small handgun he had recently started carrying – similar to a derringer, according to neighbour Greg Frizzie.
‘He just started shooting’
Other members of the group were waiting for Lind to appear, and when he bent down to turn off the water valve they allegedly attacked him with kitchen knives and impaled him with a ninja sword.
Groping blindly for his gun, Lind fired into the group, killing Emma Borhanian, a former Google employee, and wounding Alexander Leatham, a former maths student at the University of California.
“He said he got up, he couldn’t see, but he could see silhouettes of people,” Mr Frizzie said. “So he just started shooting.”
Leatham – who is said to have wielded the sword – and Dao were arrested and charged with attempted murder. Both have pleaded not guilty.
But others were allowed to leave the scene and scattered, including LaSota and another member called Gwen Danielson, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Neither have been charged with any wrongdoing in connection with the incident.
Lind spent weeks in hospital, and was left blind in one eye with a scar on his neck from where the group members had allegedly tried to behead him. Photos of the 82-year-old from then on show him with his right eye permanently closed.
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