Maximilian Snyder, one of seven members of a strange, cult-like group with Bay Area origins who are currently in police custody for a series of seemingly linked crimes, made another court appearance on Wednesday.

The Chronicle was on hand for a plea hearing for Snyder in Vallejo, and the 22-year-old data scientist and Dungeons & Dragons enthusiast was reportedly "singing" in a holding cell and humming as he came into the courtroom. Snyder entered a plea of not guilty today in the January 17 murder of 82-year-old Curtis Lind.

The hearing sounds otherwise unremarkable, and as in previous court appearances, Synder "calmly answered questions from the judge," as the Chronicle reports. Snyder made his first appearance in a Vallejo courtroom on January 28, after being arrested eight days earlier. It has apparently taken two months for Snyder to find an attorney — others in the so-called Zizians group have insisted their attorneys be vegan, like them, and that may have been the case here — and now enter a plea.

Across the country, three days after the murder of Lind, a young woman who had school ties to Snyder was allegedly involved in a shootout with US Border Patrol agents in Vermont — a shootout that ended with her friend, Ophelia Bauckholt, and one of the agents, David Maland, both death. The woman, 21-year-old Teresa Youngblut, remains in custody in Vermont, and was indicted last month on two felony weapon charges, but she will also likely face murder charges as well.

The purported ringleader of this group, which is an offshoot of the Bay Area-based Rationalist movement, is a trans woman who goes by Ziz, and whose legal name is Jack LaSota. Lind had been a landlord to LaSota and a group of others, including two who remain jailed in Vallejo, who were living in solar-powered box trucks on property Lind owned between 2019 and late 2022. It was when Lind, in November 2022, moved to evict the group — who had stopped paying rent and used pandemic eviction protections up until that point — that he was first stabbed by a group of three of them, identified as Suri Dao, Alexander "Somni" Leatham, and Emma Borhanian. Leatham allegedly impaled Lind with a samurai sword, and Borhanian was killed in the struggle by a gunshot from Lind.

Lind miraculously survived, having lost an eye to a stab wound, and he was set to testify this year against Leatham and Dao. Snyder appears to have been sent to finish the job in January, with Lind being the sole witness to his own stabbing.

Snyder has since tried to distance himself from Ziz and the others in the group, but has similarly impassioned feelings about veganism — and we know he and Youngblut applied for a marriage license in their home state of Washington last fall. The Chronicle got him to a agree to a jailhouse interview in early February, and he used this as an opporunity not to speak to the crime he's accused of, but to dictate a letter to a primary figure in the Rationalist scene, Eliezer Yudkowsky. Snyder pleaded with Yudkowsky to adopt a vegan lifestyle and to promote this, because it is "critical to saving the world."

In court last month, Ziz, aka LaSota, similarly used time before a judge in Maryland to make a plea for vegan food while in custody.

Ziz and two others, Michelle Zajko and Daniel Blank, were arrested in February in a rural area of Maryland, where they were living out of a box truck on private property. They had been on the run from authorities for about 20 months, and investigators have suggested that Youngblut and Bauckholt had been in cellphone communication with one or all of them. They likely face extradition to Pennsylvania, where all three have been persons of interest in the double murder of Zajko's parents on December 31, 2022.

The trio was originally arrested in a Philadelphia airport hotel in January 2023, but were all subsequently released from custody.

A gun registered to Zajko was also reportedly used by Youngblut in the Vermont shooting.

We may learn more about all of these cases in the coming months, as each returns to court for evidentiary hearings.

Previously: Leader of 'Zizian' Death Cult and Two Associates Arrested In Maryland After 20 Months on the Run