A creepy group that had been nicknamed "The Cult" by neighbors in Vallejo were implicated with a sword attack on their landlord two years ago. Now, two alleged associates of the group are in custody for murdering that landlord as well as a border patrol agent in Vermont.

Vallejo's first homicide of 2025 occurred on January 17. It was a stabbing, and at the time, the male victim's name was not released to the media.

The intersection where the stabbing took place, though, was familiar to Vallejo crime followers: Third and Lemon streets. It was here, at an RV lot owned by 82-year-old Curtis Lind, that a bizarre incident unfolded in November 2022 in which Lind ended up stabbed with a samurai sword. He survived the incident, but was impaled through the chest and lost his right eye.

Lind had been allowing some young people in their 20s to park their trucks on his land in 2019, and by 2022 it had been over three years since they'd paid him any rent — a COVID moratorium on evictions kept Lind from taking action until late 2022. Neighbors had observed some strange behavior from the group and nicknamed them "The Cult."

Lind's son and daughter said at the time that their father had optimistically opened up his property for artists or craftspeople who wanted to park RVs there and have space to set up studio spaces in shipping containers and the like. The group had apparently said they were working to fix up their vehicles and would leave once that was done, but three years then passed.

On November 13, 2022, after the RV dwellers learned that Lind had called in the sheriff to help evict him, they allegedly summoned him out of the trailer where he lived to help them with something. According to friend Thomas Young, they then jumped him, attacking him with knives and the sword, with the intent to dismember him and dissolve the body in a vat of acid, which they had apparently already prepared.

Lind himself was armed and shot two of his three attackers — then 27-year-old Alexander Jeffrey Leatham, who was injured; and Emma Borhanian, 31, who was killed. Leatham and another group member, Suri Dao, were both charged with attempted murder for the attack on Lind, and murder and aggravated mayhem in the death of Borhanian. They remain in custody awaiting trial.

It's unclear who from the group, if anyone, continued to live at the property, but they left behind dozens of laptops and some surgical equipment in what Young described as a "creepy" scene in their cargo truck.

And there seems to have been some vendetta against Lind in order to seek the freedom of Leatham and Dao.

As Open Vallejo reports, Lind was set to testify against the pair in an upcoming murder trial, and he was the only eye-witness to the crime. District Attorney Krishna Abrams had written in a recent court filing that the case lacked many of the pieces of evidence typical in a murder trial, like surveillance video. And the only other witness was another tenant on the property, another man in his 80s.

"Mr. Lind is the only eye-witness to this case and his testimony is critical for the People to have the ability to prove their case,” prosecutors wrote in court papers. "These defendants are extremely dangerous, they have both tried to escape from custody."

Those papers were filed on January 16, as Open Vallejo reports, one day before Lind would be stabbed, fatally this time, on his property by an assailant in a mask and black beanie.

Arrested for the stabbing was 22-year-old Max Snyder, a data scientist with an interest in AI who Open Vallejo reports is linked to the same cult-ish group, identified by some as "Zizians," an alleged radical offshoot of the Rationalist movement as it relates to artificial intelligence and "using scientific techniques to enhance human decision making." They've also been described as being "vegan sith" and all practice veganism.

The name, which the group may not even use to identify themselves, is associated with a leader named "Ziz," identified as Jack LaSota of Berkeley. LaSota, along with Leatham and Borhanian, was arrested in 2019 in Sonoma County for a protest outside a retreat being held by the Berkeley-based Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR). The protesters wore cloaks and Guy Fawkes masks, as the Chronicle reported at the time, and were carrying flyers that said, "CFAR does not do remotely what they claim to do on their website: they do not appreciably develop novel rationality/mental tech. CFAR’s founding premise (that people were blocked in having the tools to think) was falsified long ago."

LaSota was never arrested for the sword incident, however OpenVallejo notes he was known to be living at the Lemon Street property along with Leatham, Dao, and Borhanian.

Days after Lind was killed last month, a young woman who had applied for a marriage license with Snyder in November, 21-year-old Teresa Youngblut, was arrested following a shootout with border patrol agents in Vermont. (The Vermont link is unclear, however cargo trucks where the group had been living on Lind's property were reportedly registered in Vermont.) Youngblut was with a German national, Felix Baukholt, who was killed in the shootout.

As VTDigger reports, Youngblut had been in frequent contact with Snyder, and she and Baukholt had attracted law enforcement attention in Vermont, with Youngblut apparently carrying a holstered firearm.

In the shootout in Coventry, Vermont, on January 20, Baukholt was killed, and so was border patrol agent David C. Maland.

A friend of Baukholt, Jessica Taylor, says in a tweet on X that she knew Baukholt as Ophelia, and that they were "transfeminine" and "somewhat a fan of Ziz." Taylor further says that this group associated with Ziz is a "death cult" with a "high local death rate."

As the Toronto Sun reports, the gun that Youngblut used in the Vermont shootout was linked to a January 2023 double murder in Chester Heights, Pennsylvania. In that killing, 72-year-old Richard Zajko and 69-year-old Rita Zajko were killed, and the murder has been called "not random" by authorities, though any link to the above-named individuals remains unclear.

Federal authorities are now investigating the links between all three cases, and perhaps we will learn more at a later date, when indictments are filed.

Previously: Two Alleged Squatters Charged In Vallejo Death of Friend and Sword Attack on Landlord