In the wooded outskirts of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a perplexed landlord noticed odd sights at two of his rental properties.
Tenants wore long black coats and parked box trucks outside the duplexes. They ran an electrical cord from one box truck into one of the condos, and kept a stretcher inside another.
A neighbor remembers similarly dressed figures walking around at night holding hands. They never spoke a word.
By the time the FBI searched the property last week, one of the most recent tenants had been killed in a shootout with U.S. Border Patrol agents in Vermont, and a second was under arrest. A third, a shadowy figure known online as “Ziz,” remains missing after authorities linked their cultlike group to six deaths in three states.
Officials have offered few details of the cross-country investigation, which broke open after the Jan. 20 shooting death of a Border Patrol trooper in Vermont during a traffic stop. media interviews and a review of court records and online postings tell the story of how a group of young, highly intelligent computer scientists, most of them in their 20s and 30s, met online, shared anarchist beliefs, and became increasingly violent.
Their goals aren’t clear, but online writings span topics from radical veganism and gender identity to artificial intelligence.
At the middle of it all is “Ziz,” who appears to be the leader of the strange group, who called themselves “Zizians.” She has been seen near multiple crime scenes and has connections to various suspects.
She was even declared dead for a time, before reappearing amid more violence.
Jack LaSota moved to the San Francisco Bay area after earning a computer science degree from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 2013 and interning at NASA, according to a profile on a hiring site for programmers, coders and other freelance workers. NASA officials did not respond to a request to confirm LaSota’s internship, but a Jack LaSota is listed on a website about past interns.
In 2016, she began publishing a dark and rambling blog under the name Ziz, describing her theory that the two hemispheres of the brain could hold separate values and genders and “often desire to kill each other.”
LaSota used she/her pronouns, and in her writings says she is a transgender woman. She railed against perceived enemies, including so-called rationalist groups, which operate mostly online and seek to understand human cognition through reason and knowledge. Some are concerned with the potential dangers of artificial intelligence.
LaSota began promoting an extreme mix of rationalism, ethical veganism, anarchism and other value systems, said Jessica Taylor, an AI researcher who met LaSota both in person and online through the rationalist community and knew her as Ziz.
When LaSota left the rationalists behind, she took with her a group of “extremely vulnerable and isolated” followers, Anna Salamon, executive director of the Center for Applied Rationality, told the San Francisco Chronicle.
Taylor said Ziz adherents use the rationalist ideology as a reason to commit violence. “Stuff like, thinking it’s reasonable to avoid paying rent and defend oneself from being evicted,” she said.
Poulomi Saha, a professor who has studied cults, said LaSota’s beliefs and writings may have made readers feel seen, an often central factor in the formation of groups commonly labeled cults. That’s especially true in the era of online communities, in which it’s easier for marginalized people to seek fellow believers.
“For the person who feels hailed by that blog post, there is likely to be a kind of dual experience,” said Saha, co-director of the program in critical theory at the University of California, Berkeley. “One where they feel like ‘I have been saying this, or thinking this, all along, and no one has believed me.’”
LaSota, 34, has not responded to multiple media emails in recent weeks, and her attorney Daniel McGarrigle declined to comment when asked whether she is connected to any of the deaths. She has missed court appearances in two states, and bench warrants have been issued for her arrest. media reporters have left numerous phone and e-mail messages with LaSota’s family and received no response.
In November 2019, LaSota was arrested along with several other people at a protest outside a Northern California retreat center where the Center for Applied Rationality was holding an event. Sheriff’s deputies called in a SWAT team and armored vehicle after the mask-wearing group blocked the property’s exits and handed out fliers railing against the rationalist organization. The group said they were protesting sexual misconduct inside the rationalist group.
The case against LaSota, Emma Borhanian, 31, Gwen Danielson and Alexander Leatham, 29, was pending in August 2022 when the U.S. Coast Guard responded to a report that LaSota had fallen out of a boat in San Francisco Bay. Her body wasn’t found, but her mother confirmed the death and an obituary was published.
It wasn’t long before Ziz surfaced again.
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