Alexander Leatham, a 29-year-old transgender woman accused of impaling her Vallejo landlord with a sword in the first of several deadly incidents now linked to a cult-like Bay Area group, declined to appear in person for her latest hearing in Solano County Superior Court.
Appearing over Zoom on Feb. 19, she nevertheless used the opportunity to make a statement to the judge, attorneys, and reporters who attended the proceeding in Courtroom 101.
“This is a show trial to coordinate the genocide of transgender people,” Leatham chanted for less than a minute before Judge John B. Ellis, who seemed unfazed by the disturbance, muted her microphone.
It was far from Leatham’s first outburst in court. Her separate criminal cases in Solano and Sonoma counties have been marked by chaos and delays over the past five years, including attempts to disqualify judges assigned to the Sonoma case and frequent disruptions during hearings, according to a review of nearly 1,000 pages of court documents and transcripts by Open Vallejo.
While other people linked to a group known as the Zizians have been detained just this year in connection with recent violence, Leatham has been caught up in criminal proceedings since 2019 and in custody for more than two years. As a result, records from her cases provide deeper insight into Leatham’s beliefs, which other individuals affiliated with the fringe Zizian ideology seem to share.
People who appear connected with the group have been charged or named as persons of interest in connection with six deaths across the country, including the stabbing of an 82-year-old Vallejo landlord in January, the shooting of a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Vermont three days later, and the 2022 double homicide of an elderly Pennsylvania couple.
Leatham’s court filings highlight her devotion to veganism and advocacy for her rights as a transgender woman, which she alleges have been violated during her time in custody. They also demonstrate an apparent refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the California justice system and raise questions about her mental competency. For example, Leatham alleged in motions filed in Sonoma County several years ago that the judge overseeing her case was “evil,” the police officers who arrested her were “imposters,” and that she had been forced “to pretend that I believe this is a real justice system.”
“I have not had time to properly prepare this motion,” Leatham, acting as her own attorney, wrote in a July 2022 motion to dismiss, “as I must also prepare my defense for the true justice system.”
‘Eager to learn’
Like others affiliated with the Zizians, Leatham was once a bright student who earned opportunities and recognition for her sharp mathematical mind.
In middle school, Leatham studied math for back-to-back summers at the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, a competitive academic summer camp affectionately referred to by some participants as “nerd camp,” according to a person who befriended Leatham there.
The person spoke with Open Vallejo on the condition of anonymity because she was fearful her name would be associated with the ongoing criminal cases. A program representative declined to comment for this story.
The fellow camper said Leatham was kind, quiet, and apparently neurodivergent. Like others who attended the camp, she said, Leatham seemed to find comfort among a community of other highly intelligent kids who enjoyed philosophical debates and thought experiments.
“She was just quiet and kind of weird, but all of us were weird,” the person said, noting that she was surprised to learn of Leatham’s alleged involvement with the Zizians. “I think that’s why this was so shocking to us. She was just another kid from nerd camp.”
In 2010, as a freshman at Agoura High School in an upscale suburb of Los Angeles, Leatham was accepted into the Ross Mathematics Program. The intense six-week summer program, then hosted at The Ohio State University, is geared toward high school students who are passionate about math, said Daniel Shapiro, the program’s director emeritus.
Shapiro said Leatham, who went by Alec and used male pronouns at the time, spent two summers immersed in the program. Leatham was “well trained in math and eager to learn,” he said.
Leatham “did quite well in the math, got along well with others, and was quiet and polite,” Shapiro said, adding that she “was a big fan of the Lord of the Rings and had learned some Elvish,” a fictional language in the fantasy series. Shapiro said he was sad to learn that Leatham “moved away from a promising career in math or computer science, and has been accused of various criminal activities.”
An article in the Ventura County Star about Leatham’s acceptance into the Ross Program also notes that Leatham was a Math Honor Society tutor who studied advanced math through the Jisan Research Institute.
Leatham attended the University of California, Los Angeles from 2014 to 2016 as a pre-mathematics major but never earned a degree, according to the university. She later attended the University of California, Berkeley, according to her Facebook profile, although the university declined to confirm Leatham’s enrollment.
In the summer of 2017, Leatham, who had started going by the name Somni, attended a month-long fellowship hosted by the Center for Applied Rationality, a Berkeley nonprofit that trains people to overcome cognitive bias. Jack LaSota, who wrote a blog under the nickname Ziz, attended a similar CFAR fellowship in 2018, according to Anna Salamon, who co-founded the nonprofit.
Salamon told Open Vallejo that her organization’s workshops attracted mostly programmers in their 20s and 30s who were “very smart but often a bit autistic or socially naive.” People who attended the workshops stayed in touch through social events, online forums, and, in some cases, group living, creating a tight-knit Bay Area community of people interested in rationalist philosophy and the risk posed to humanity by the rapid development of artificial intelligence.
In September 2018, Leatham purchased a 32-foot Rawson sailboat named Islander and signed a guest agreement to dock the craft at Marina Bay Yacht Harbor in Richmond, according to records obtained by Open Vallejo.
The following year, after falling out with the rationalist community, Leatham was involved in a protest against CFAR that resulted in lengthy criminal cases for her and three friends — and sparked the beginning of a years-long court saga.
Westminster Woods
On a November afternoon in 2019, Leatham, LaSota, and two other friends — Emma Borhanian and Gwen Danielson — used an old school bus and white Ford Econoline truck to block the entrances and exits to Westminster Woods, a remote retreat center located off Bohemian Highway in the Sonoma County redwoods, according to law enforcement records.
The group, who had become disillusioned with leaders of the Bay Area rationalist community, planned to protest a CFAR alumni reunion scheduled to begin roughly an hour later by handing out flyers criticizing the organization for straying from its mission.
But an unrelated group, including 18 elementary school children and their teachers, was already on the property when the protesters blocked access roads and began donning white Guy Fawkes masks, hooded black robes, and black gloves.
Police records show that the camp director asked the newcomers to leave and called authorities when they refused. Another caller reported that a protester was “possibly armed with a gun,” according to an incident report from the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office. That caller told a dispatcher she was scared to get off the phone because someone, later identified as Leatham, had entered the main office wearing a white mask and black robe.
Sonoma County Sheriff Deputy Sgt. Brian Parks, who responded to the incident, wrote in a follow-up report that similar masks have been worn by anarchists and people involved in mass shootings, leading him to suspect “they were dressed this way to create fear.”
“I believed that a more serious crime was potentially afoot,” Parks wrote in the report. “Their actions did not appear consistent with the average protester.”
Deputies arrested LaSota, Danielson, and Borhanian, law enforcement records show. They demanded same-gender pat-downs, according to Parks. As Leatham walked out of the office building in a dark robe, Parks ordered her to the ground at gunpoint. Leatham complied by kicking her legs forward and falling flat on her back, Parks wrote in his report, a move he described as “extremely dramatic.”
The sheriff’s office requested mutual aid from the California Highway Patrol and called in a SWAT team, four K-9 handlers, a bomb squad, and a helicopter to search the 200-acre property “for any outstanding suspects,” according to the incident report. Meanwhile, authorities escorted the children, teachers, and staff members from the property in an armored vehicle.
The search team found no more threats — only a man crouched beside a building who had armed himself with a hatchet because he believed there was an active shooter. The sheriff’s office partially denied a public records request from Open Vallejo seeking more investigative materials from the incident. A four-page report released by the agency does not mention a gun being recovered.
‘You are slavers. You are Nazis.’
Sonoma County prosecutors charged Leatham, LaSota, Danielson, and Borhanian with felony conspiracy and five misdemeanors: obstructing a peace officer, wearing a mask for unlawful purposes, trespassing, false imprisonment, and child cruelty, for allegedly traumatizing the kids who were rushed from the property, according to court records. All four were released on bail within days.
Leatham, who was released four days after her arrest, claimed she was “tortured” at the Sonoma County Jail, alleging that guards denied her requests for vegan food, placed a gag in her mouth and a bag over her head, gawked at her naked body, and “debated between themselves what my gender was,” according to a sworn declaration filed in court in July 2022.
“The guards were unmistakably evil,” Leatham wrote.
Sgt. Juan Valencia, public information officer for the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office, told Open Vallejo that the allegations are false, adding that jail staff treat all inmates with “dignity and respect.”
Valencia said the jail accommodates dietary needs based on religious beliefs and allergies. In general, Valencia said, inmates at risk of committing suicide are stripped of clothing and placed in safety cells. Other inmates may be fitted with a special mask to prevent them from spitting on guards, he said. Valencia said he did not know if Leatham was subject to those procedures.
As the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered much activity across the Bay Area in early 2020, the criminal case against Leatham and her co-defendants progressed slowly through the court system.
The defendants’ own actions slowed the case even further. In 2021, Leatham filed a motion to disqualify the prosecution and three motions to disqualify Judge Shelly Averill, largely based on allegations that Averill misgendered Leatham on several occasions, according to court records.
During a hearing in September of that year, for example, Averill referred to Leatham using male pronouns. The judge then heard “inaudible yelling” from the defendants on Zoom, one of whom stood up and waved their arms around, according to a transcript of the hearing. One defendant leaned into the microphone and yelled, “What the fuck?”
Averill disconnected the Zoom, citing the “foul behavior,” according to court records. The judge said she could not understand much of the outburst because of a poor internet connection, but noted of the unidentified defendant, “it was clear that he was upset with the process.”
In the following months, Leatham filed two separate motions to disqualify Averill, claiming that the judge “wants to destroy everything — especially prioritizing that which is good.”
“Shelly Averill is evil. Shelly Averill has read my previous accusation that she is evil and has not denied that she is evil,” Leatham wrote in a Nov. 24, 2021, verified statement of disqualification. “I am no man! I will never be a man, no matter how much humans like Shelly Averill want to eradicate that truth from existence.”
In a response filed in December 2021, Averill acknowledged that she had used the wrong title and pronouns for Leatham several times, noting that it was an inadvertent mistake and she meant no offense. Averill wrote that she would have court staff note the correct title and pronouns for each defendant in the case file.
Frustrations with the years-long case bubbled over during an April 2022 hearing when Leatham told a new judge assigned to the case, Christopher Honigsberg, that she failed to show up in person because she had been exposed to COVID.
“You weren’t in court here at the last time we were here,” Honigsberg said, according to a transcript of the hearing. “At this point the court is wondering whether the reason you’re not coming to court is because it’s an intentional plan to delay the case.”
Leatham told the judge she was repeatedly exposed to COVID because she is homeless.
“Maybe I’m exposed more than you because you live in a house,” Leatham said.
Later that month, according to court records, Leatham filed a motion to disqualify Honigsberg, in part because his wife had been the director of the Sonoma County Independent Office of Law Enforcement Review when Leatham lodged a misconduct complaint against the sheriff’s office.
In subsequent motions filed between July and October 2022, however, Leatham’s arguments became increasingly incoherent. In a motion filed that September, Leatham wrote that she had identified the judge and district attorney on her case as the “spiritual incarnations of the imposter police officers who kidnapped us.”
“When they were abducting me I identified my assailants from what I remembered of them from past incarnations,” Leatham wrote. “I said ‘I KNOW YOUR FACE. YOU ARE SLAVERS. YOU ARE NAZIS.’”
The same month, Leatham requested a change of venue due to “genocidal intent towards transgender women,” according to court records.
“This land is outside the jurisdiction of the Sonoma Courthouse, just as a woman’s womb is outside the jurisdiction of a man who raped her,” Leatham wrote in the September 8, 2022, motion. “Sonoma County is infested with evil spirits who are colluding with each other to kill us and silence our vengeful souls as we reincarnate in the bodies of Indigenous peoples and animals.”
Records show that Honigsberg suspended the criminal proceedings against Leatham on Oct. 26, 2022, and ordered a doctor to evaluate her mental competence to stand trial.
But the case remains at a standstill. Less than three weeks later, Leatham would be apprehended by law enforcement in neighboring Solano County, accused this time of a much more serious crime.
‘Aggravating factors’
By 2022, the four defendants in the Sonoma County protest case were living in box trucks parked in a Vallejo junkyard owned by Curtis Lind, an 80-year-old boating enthusiast. A neighbor told Open Vallejo he regularly saw one tenant, a transgender woman, meandering naked or topless along train tracks near the property with a vacant look in her eyes. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear for his safety.
The tenants had allegedly stopped paying rent, and Lind obtained an order to evict them. Two days before the scheduled eviction, however, a person identified in court records as Suri Dao lured Lind from his trailer home by asking him to help with a water leak, according to Solano County prosecutors.
Dao, Leatham, and another of the Sonoma County protesters, Emma Borhanian, then allegedly attacked their landlord with knives, according to prosecutors, who say that Leatham impaled Lind through the chest with a sword. Lind managed to get to his feet and shoot at his assailants, striking Borhanian and Leatham. Borhanian, a former Google employee who moved to the Bay Area to pursue her passion for computer science, died at the scene.
Prosecutors charged Leatham and Dao with the murder of Borhanian, the attempted murder of Lind, and aggravated mayhem, according to court records. Earlier this month, prosecutors moved to add several aggravating factors to the charges against both, including an allegation that they took advantage of a position of trust or confidence to commit the crime, targeted a particularly vulnerable victim, and carried out the offense with “planning, sophistication, or professionalism,” according to court records.
Carol Long, the alternate public defender representing Leatham in Solano County, declined to comment on the pending case. A spokesperson for the Solano County Sheriff’s Office said Leatham was not accepting media interviews in jail per her attorney’s request. Attempts to reach Leatham’s family were unsuccessful.
While Leatham was being treated in the hospital for gunshot wounds, she refused to identify herself or speak to detectives, according to a motion filed by prosecutors in December. Two weeks after her arrest, prosecutors said, Leatham attempted to escape from the hospital by feigning sleep one night after dinner. When the sheriff’s deputy watching her went to the bathroom, he returned to find an empty hospital bed.
Leatham had bolted from her room, rushed down a 40-foot hallway, and fled the hospital through an emergency exit, prosecutors allege. The deputy quickly caught up with Leatham, preventing her escape, according to court records.
Leatham allegedly tried to escape again before a February 2023 court appearance in Vallejo, according to prosecutors. She requested a wheelchair due to fatigue and, when the deputy went to retrieve it, ran out of the transport truck and toward a locked fence; a deputy caught Leatham that time, too. Prosecutors charged Leatham with two felony escape attempts in connection with the incidents.
Later that year, the court found Leatham incompetent to stand trial “based on her autism and its impact on her ability to cooperate and assist counsel,” according to court records. She pushed back on the ruling, however, dictating several messages that others passed on to the judge: “I am rational. I do not have a ‘mental illness’ and I do not need ‘treatment.’” Nonetheless, Leatham was transferred to Porterville Developmental Center in August 2023; she returned to Solano County Jail last February.
The court reinstated criminal proceedings last July but denied Leatham’s request to represent herself.
In August, Leatham filed a handwritten civil rights complaint against Solano County alleging that multiple guards have mistreated her for being a transgender woman during her time in the jail, according to court records. The allegations mirror those from Leatham’s case against Sonoma County, which a federal judge dismissed in 2023 when the four plaintiffs stopped showing up for court.
In the latest lawsuit, Leatham alleges that she was housed with men when she was brought to Solano County Jail in December 2022, although her state identification listed her gender as female. Leatham said male inmates harassed her and called her names. She further alleges that a deputy said she deserved her gunshot injuries “for being a woke who thinks he can change from being a man to a woman,” according to the complaint.
Leatham additionally alleges that on multiple occasions, a group of guards forcibly pressed her against the floor, cut off her clothes, stared at her genitals, and told her they were conducting a “cross-gender strip search,” according to the complaint. Leatham said she was kept in a medical isolation cell with no outside window or light switch for roughly four months after she refused to be housed in the men’s general population unit.
Leatham also alleges that Wellpath, the medical and mental health provider for Solano County Jail, has failed to provide her prescribed hormones, causing “severe damage to my body and mind,” according to the complaint.
A spokesperson for the Solano County Sheriff’s Office told Open Vallejo the agency could not comment on pending litigation. Wellpath declined to comment on the ongoing litigation, noting in a statement that patient safety and well-being “are our primary concern.”
The same month she filed the lawsuit, Leatham appeared in court for another hearing before Judge Ellis in Vallejo, this time in person. Ellis entered a not guilty plea for Leatham on all charges, according to a transcript of the proceedings. Leatham did not answer any of his questions. Instead, as Ellis tried to conduct the courtroom proceeding, she repeated the same words nearly a hundred times.
“This is a show trial to coordinate the genocide of transgender people,” Leatham said.
“Do you have something else to say aside from— ” Ellis began.
“This is a show trial to coordinate the genocide of transgender people,” she said.
“ —trying to interrupt the Court?” the judge finished.
“This is a show trial to coordinate the genocide of transgender people,” she said.
Editor’s note: Open Vallejo is identifying Alexander Leatham by the name she uses in both personal and official documents, including documents in which she identifies as a woman. Although Leatham also goes by the screenname Somni, it is not clear that she uses it in other aspects of her life. Attempts to reach Leatham’s family to clarify her preference were unsuccessful, and her attorney did not respond to questions about which name she prefers.
This story has been updated to reflect that Leatham attended a CFAR workshop only in 2017.
