A 34-year-old computer engineer who lived in Vallejo for years and has apparent ties to people of interest in murder investigations in California and Pennsylvania faked their own death in 2022, according to a review of police and court records by Open Vallejo.
Lawyers and family members of Jack Amadeus LaSota, also known as “Ziz,” seemed to believe that they died in August 2022 after falling from a boat into the San Francisco Bay, according to court records and an obituary published in LaSota’s hometown newspaper in Alaska.
But LaSota’s body was never recovered. Records show LaSota was detained by police at the scene of a stabbing in Vallejo three months after their alleged death. They were arrested in Pennsylvania during a raid connected to a double homicide investigation the following year, according to court records.
LaSota was never charged in connection with the 2022 stabbing in Vallejo. Court records show Pennsylvania authorities charged LaSota with obstruction and disorderly conduct but released them on bail in 2023. LaSota apparently remains free from custody but has warrants out for their arrest for failing to appear in court in both states, according to court records.
On Aug. 19 at approximately 11 p.m., the U.S. Coast Guard Sector San Francisco received a report that LaSota fell off a boat in the middle of the San Francisco Bay, according to a Coast Guard search report obtained by Open Vallejo. The Coast Guard initiated an unsuccessful search that lasted nearly 30 hours, with assistance from three local fire departments.
LaSota’s hometown newspaper, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, published LaSota’s obituary on Sept. 7, 2022.
“Jack Amadeus LaSota left our lives but not our hearts on Aug. 19 after a boating accident,” a post on Legacy.com reads. “Loving adventure, friends and family, music, blueberries, biking, computer games and animals, you are missed.”
Hunter Schnabel, a public affairs officer for the U.S. Coast Guard in Alameda, said the agency does not have the authority to declare a person dead.
“If somebody didn’t want to be found and they were to disappear in that nature,” he said, “the Coast Guard isn’t going to investigate.”
‘Alive and well’
An attorney for LaSota, Jerold Friedman, learned about the boating accident while representing them and three others in a federal civil rights lawsuit against Sonoma County. The four plaintiffs alleged that sheriff’s deputies falsely arrested them during a 2019 protest and mistreated them while in custody. Sonoma County prosecutors charged all four with felony conspiracy, as well as misdemeanor obstruction and false imprisonment, in connection with the protest, court records show.
In a January 2023 motion to withdraw from the civil rights case, Friedman wrote that he had not heard from LaSota in a year. He said his client’s mother and criminal defense attorney informed him that LaSota had died. Friedman wrote in the same declaration that he heard a “rumor” that another defendant in the Sonoma County case, Gwen Danielson, “may have committed suicide,” and that he also had not heard from her in a year.
In an interview, Friedman told Open Vallejo that a Pennsylvania state trooper later informed him that a witness reportedly saw Danielson in late 2022 or early 2023 retrieving belongings from the Vallejo property where she had been living with LaSota and others.
Friedman said in the interview he does not know whether Danielson is alive, adding that people sometimes do irrational things when facing a possible criminal conviction.
“I have no reason to say this is what happened,” Friedman said when asked why his former clients might fake their deaths. “But when I try to piece these things together, that’s kind of the only thing that makes sense — that something scared them.”
Months after LaSota’s reported death, Vallejo officers made contact with LaSota at the scene of an attack against their landlord on Nov. 13, 2022, according to police and court records. Shortly after the incident, a Sonoma County prosecutor informed LaSota’s criminal defense attorney that LaSota was “alive and well,” according to court records.
During that incident, at least three tenants allegedly stabbed 80-year-old Curtis Allen Lind at his 3rd Street property in Vallejo two days before they were set to be evicted for failing to pay rent, according to court records. Lind, who was impaled with a sword during the attack, was blinded in one eye and hospitalized for a month. LaSota appears to have been living with friends inside outfitted box trucks on the property at the time, according to records obtained by Open Vallejo and sources familiar with the incident.
Alexander Leatham and Suri Dao were charged in Solano County with the attempted murder of Lind and the murder of another tenant, Emma Borhanian, who was shot by Lind during the attack, according to court records. Lind was supposed to testify against them as the sole eyewitness in a trial set for April. LaSota was not charged in connection with the incident.
A person close to Borhanian who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution said Vallejo police detectives told the family that Borhanian was unarmed during the attack. The source said she lost contact with Borhanian after Borhanian moved to the Bay Area to work at Google, describing her as intelligent and passionate about coding.
“She was never a violent person,” the source said, noting that the circumstances of her death came as a shock.
Lind, 82, was stabbed to death outside the same Vallejo property in broad daylight on Jan. 17. Prosecutors have alleged that 22-year-old Maximilian Snyder killed Lind to prevent him from testifying as a witness in the trial, a capital offense that could be punished by death. Snyder had applied for a marriage license in Washington with 21-year-old Teresa Youngblut, who faces federal charges for a deadly shootout on Jan. 20 with Border Patrol agents in Vermont.
The couple apparently held views sympathetic to a fringe offshoot of Rationalist ideology widely attributed to LaSota known as Zizianism, which includes core beliefs such as veganism and preventing artificial intelligence from destroying humanity, according to online blog posts and interviews conducted by Open Vallejo.
The court records do not indicate any connection between LaSota and the 2025 killing. LaSota has an outstanding bench warrant in Sonoma County related to their alleged involvement in the 2019 protest against the Center for Applied Rationality, a Berkeley nonprofit whose leaders LaSota had a falling out with.
LaSota appeared in court records again on Jan. 13, 2023, after state troopers in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, arrested them while executing a warrant in a double homicide investigation. Rita and Richard Zajko had been shot dead in their home earlier that month, and police believed their daughter, Michelle Zajko, was in possession of the murder weapon, according to a transcript of a court hearing obtained by Open Vallejo.
State troopers executed a search warrant at a motel where Michelle Zajko was staying the week after her parents’ deaths. Authorities did not find a weapon in Michelle Zajko’s room, but motel staff told them that another person she knew was staying in a separate room, according to the transcript. When police executed a warrant for the other room, they found two people, including LaSota, hiding in the bathroom. After being detained, LaSota reportedly kept their eyes closed and refused to speak.
“He was just laying almost unconscious or as if he was dead on the ground,” Trooper Matthew Smith testified in a later court hearing. Smith said at least four troopers had to carry LaSota, who is more than six feet tall, from the hotel room.
LaSota was charged with disorderly conduct and obstruction, according to Delaware County court records. A judge set bail at $500,000; it was later dropped to $10,000, which LaSota posted in June 2023 over prosecutors’ objections. LaSota’s attorney assured the judge that LaSota’s mother “will take him home and make sure he comes back for all the court dates,” according to transcripts of the bail hearing.
But LaSota failed to appear for a December 2023 trial, prompting the judge to issue a bench warrant for their arrest. Neither LaSota nor their parents responded to requests for comment.
“Good” or “evil”
LaSota, 34, graduated from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks in 2013 with a Bachelor’s degree in computer engineering. They pursued a master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign from 2013–2014 but did not graduate, according to university officials.
It is unclear when exactly LaSota arrived in the Bay Area, but according to the Center for Applied Rationality co-founder Anna Salamon, they attended a 5-day residency workshop organized by the nonprofit in July 2014. Salamon said the purpose of the workshop was to teach critical thinking skills and techniques to enhance and understand human decision-making — key aspects of the Rationalist movement.
CFAR was founded in 2012 as a branch of the Machine Intelligence Learning Institute, a research organization dedicated to safety in artificial intelligence development. The organization’s workshops attracted smart, idealistic young people who “wanted to help with things,” Salamon said.
Salamon told Open Vallejo that LaSota attended three CFAR events between 2014 and 2018. Concerned by their “weird” behavior and interactions with other CFAR attendees, Salamon tried to convince a joint admissions committee between the Machine Intelligence Learning Institute and CFAR to not admit LaSota into their month-long summer fellowship in 2018. Salamon, however, was overruled.
“When LaSota attended the final program in summer 2018, I was physically afraid in a way I’ve never been with anyone else,” Salamon said in an email to Open Vallejo.
Salamon was concerned with some of the ideas that LaSota talked about during the workshops and with her in private. They included theories on “hemispheric sleep,” in which LaSota claimed that humans can split their consciousness between two sides of the brain, allowing one side to sleep while the other is awake, she said. In addition, these two sides of the brain may be “good,” “evil,” or both.
Salamon said she was also concerned about LaSota’s relationship with Danielson, another CFAR workshop attendee who later lived with LaSota on Lind’s Vallejo property. Salamon said the two agreed LaSota was “double good” and that Danielson was “single good,” which apparently meant Danielson could not be fully trusted and “had to be watched carefully.”
Blog posts apparently written by LaSota under the name Ziz compared being “single good” to having a parasitic monster inside a person’s head that needed to be destroyed at all costs.
As Salamon and other CFAR staff became more concerned with LaSota’s behavior, including what she said was a fixation on discussing apocalyptic events, Salamon stopped inviting LaSota to CFAR events.
In the early morning of a 2019 alumni reunion event, LaSota sent a mass email to CFAR and MIRI members accusing them of betraying the Rationalist movement, and linked several times to LaSota’s blog.
“If you do not want to die with this plague consuming our world, then turn your hopes back to the hard-to-define things that generated these institutions that no longer deserve them,” LaSota wrote in the email obtained by Open Vallejo.
Later that day, a SWAT team from the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office arrested Lasota, Danielson, Alexander Leatham and Emma Borhanian for allegedly blocking the exits of the event at the Westminister Camp and Conference Center in Sonoma County with multiple vehicles, while wearing black robes and Guy Fawkes masks.
Friedman, the attorney who represented the four protesters in a civil rights lawsuit alleging mistreatment during their time in jail, said LaSota, Leatham, Borhanian, and Danielson hired him in part because he was vegan. He described them as “four passionate individuals who are obviously concerned about the world, with veganism, concerned about non-human animals.”
“I always understood them to be very focused in trying to make the world better, so I don’t really understand how we got from there to where we are,” Friedman said, noting that veganism is rooted in non-violence and pacifism. “My impressions of them at the time were all good.”
Leatham, while facing criminal charges from the Sonoma County protest, appeared in court wearing a hazmat suit and gas mask, according to court records. In the murder case against her in Solano County, she wrote in a complaint to Judge Tim P. Kam in July 2023 that prosecutors had called her political and religious beliefs “delusions,” according to court records.
“Is it my belief that people reincarnate? Is it my belief that financially supporting death camps and consuming the corpses of their victims is wrong and those who do so are monsters? Which of my political and religious beliefs is she claiming is a ‘delusion’? And why?” Leatham wrote in the email. “Everything I believe, I choose to believe because it is good that it is true.”
Leatham and Danielson had also attended CFAR events in the past, according to Salamon, with Danielson attending two of the same events as LaSota.
Felix Bauckholt, who was killed in the recent shootout with U.S. Border Patrol agents in which Youngblut is charged, also attended a CFAR event in 2019, according to Salamon.
Salamon told Open Vallejo that she requested Bauckholt not be invited back for similar reasons as LaSota. LaSota and Bauckholt did not attend any events at the same time, according to Salamon, and it is not clear if they had ever met in person.
“It crossed my mind that there could be offshoots,” Salamon said about the Rationalist community. “It did not cross my mind that there could be offshoots that were death cults.”
