FBI agents who say that they were punished after exposing wrongdoing in the department during the administration of former President Joe Biden are asking new FBI Director Kash Patel to review their cases.
In early March the group, Empower Oversight sent letter to Samuel Ramer, who serves as the FBI general counsel, in which is asked for assistance related to the alleged improper treatment of the whistleblowers, which included FBI agents and employees Garret O’Boyle, Marcus Allen, Stephen Friend, Zach Schofftsall, Monica Shillingburg, and Michael Zummer, Just The News reported.
Another four clients mentioned in the letter had their names redacted, including one who wants to share information on his time working under the infamous Peter Strzok.
One of the whistleblowers, staff operations specialist Marcus Allen, had his security clearance suspended “for questioning whether Director (Christopher) Wray had testified truthfully to Congress and other allegations based on SOS Allen’s political beliefs and concerns about the COVID-19 vaccine.”
The agent, who was assigned to the FBI’s Charlotte Division, “was suspended indefinitely without pay.”
The group said that the FBI reached a settlement with Allen but that it did not completely fulfill its obligations under the agreement. It said that the FBI still needs to fix its client’s W2 tax forms and pay him the correct amount of leave he is owed.
“While I feel vindicated now in getting back my security clearance, it is sad that in the country I fought for as a Marine, the FBI was allowed to lie about my loyalty to the U.S. for two years,” the formerly suspended agent said. “Unless there is accountability, it will keep happening to others. Better oversight and changes to security clearance laws are key to stop abuses suffered by whistleblowers like me.”
Empower Oversight wants a “fresh review” of his and other whistleblower cases as well.
“The actions taken against our clients were in reprisal for protected whistleblowing and/or improper targeting because of their political beliefs,” organization founder and chairman Jason Foster said in the letter to the FBI.
“The common theme among most of our clients who had their security clearances suspended and or revoked is the FBI’s ability to indefinitely delay the process and financially pressure FBI employees by suspending their pay and blocking their ability to earn a living any other way. Most facing that dilemma simply resign with no prospect of a fair process to challenge it, which allows the pattern to repeat without remedy,” he said.
The attorneys representing the FBI agents said that “if the review by your office alone does not lead to direct managerial action to remedy the harms and resolve our clients’ pending matters, we would be willing to propose to our clients that they enter into mediation facilitated by a neutral mediator — assuming an acceptable senior official with no animus toward our clients is delegated settlement authority to represent the FBI in the mediation.”
The group said that “while we appreciate your review of these cases to explore ways to amicably resolve and remedy the harms the FBI has inflicted on our clients, we are also willing to engage in other good faith efforts to reach the same goals.”
“A lot of our work has to remain confidential because some clients do not wish to become public figures. Sometimes though, it takes public scrutiny to move the needle,” Foster said when he spoke to Just the News.
“These FBI clients have waited a very long time on a system that, as of today, is still failing to keep its promises to protect whistleblowers from retaliation. It’s past time to make good on those promises and give them real meaning in these cases,” Foster added. [SOURCE]
ABC News received a 23 page fax at 8:26 a.m. allegedly sent by Flanagan[53] titled, "Suicide Note for Friend & Family". In the document, Flanagan described his grievances over what he alleged to be racial discrimination and sexual harassment committed by black men and white women in his workplace, believing that he was targeted because he was a homosexual black man.[8][17][54] He claimed to have been provoked by the Charleston church shooting, two months before, and made threatening comments about Dylann Roof, the perpetrator of that crime.[51] Flanagan described the church shooting as a "tipping point", saying that his anger had been "building steadily" and describing himself as "a human powder keg ... just waiting to go BOOM".[8] A spokesman for the Franklin County Sheriff's Office said that Flanagan "very closely identified" with "individuals who have committed domestic acts of violence and mass murder, as well as the September 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S."[55] Flanagan said that Jehovah had told him to act and expressed an admiration for Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who perpetrated the 1999 Columbine High School massacre; and Seung-Hui Cho, the perpetrator of the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting.[17][56] Flanagan said in the note, "Yeah I'm all fucked up in the head."[57]
[SOURCE]
The mass murderer who killed six people at a Christian school in Nashville left instructions for the media to refer to her by her transgender name “Aiden,” believed deeply in extreme gender ideology and critical theory, and believed death constituted part of the “deconstruction” of an old society that would be followed by a “reconstruction” ushering in “LGBTQ rights.” Hale idolized the Columbine high school shooters and hated “conservative religion.” On one page, she appears to have drawn an inverted cross and the number 666.
Nearly 18 months after the March 27, 2023, school shooting claimed the lives of three nine-year-old students and three staffers, the media have released more of killer Audrey Elizabeth Hale’s writings describing the reasons behind the deadly rampage. The Biden-Harris administration’s FBI encouraged the Metro Nashville police chief to bottle up Hale’s “confusing” writings for fear they would stoke “conspiracy theories.” Authorities then suppressed the writings over an alleged “ongoing investigation,” and a court ruled this July that the writings could not be released due to copyright infringement.
But on Tuesday morning, The Tennessee Star published a PDF of the nearly 90-page journal Hale kept during 2023, including the days leading up to this shooting. “On July 31, 2024 we appealed the trial court’s ruling to the Tennessee Court of Appeals. We expect to win our appeal,” explained Michael Patrick Leahy, CEO of Star News Digital Media Inc. and editor-in-chief of The Tennessee Star. “[W]e have had the First Amendment right to publish these writings since early June when we first received them.”
The Tennessee Star had published dozens of stories detailing the journal’s contents. But the full journal — released 526 days after the shooting at Nashville’s Covenant School, a Christian school operated by a local Presbyterian church — contains additional information and new details about the killer’s beliefs and motivations.
The journal, which the Star refers to as “The Covenant Killer’s 2023 Journal,” is a Mead Five Star notebook with the name “Aiden” written on the red cover. In the upper-lefthand corner, Hale emblazoned a symbol which adorns many pages that speak of the impending mass shooting: an octagon with a black cross in the center.
The journal’s contents reveal the depth of her commitment to extreme transgender ideology and her mystical belief that, by dying, she would be reborn into a male body that could carry out sexual relations with “brown girls” in the afterlife. She seems to indicate death is part of nature’s process of inverting negative political forces into progressive political change toward “civil rights.”
“Why does my brain not work right? ‘Cause I was born wrong!!!” the journal opens. “Nothing on earth can save me… never ending pain. Religion won’t save.”
“Everything hurts,” she writes repeatedly.
Much of the journal notes Hale’s deep depression at her inability to keep a job or succeed in a creative field. The pervasive tone of suicidal depression clings to every page. “My soul worth nothing but my dead body will be worth more,” she writes. “I hurt bad enough & long enough that I need to die,” she continues. “I hurt too bad. Too many tears. I want to die.”
One page recounts her list of failures, accomplishing only one of four tasks she desired. Hale appears to have considered herself a tortured genius. “My mind is creative, brilliant, but a living hell at the same time,” she writes. “Having a brain like mind has its godliness but also prone to make poor a** decisions.”
“I am shining outside, but my heart is black,” writes Hale.
Hale believed that her death in a mass murder-suicide would open the door to the male sexual experiences she longed to enjoy on Earth — and implied it somehow embodied part of a supernatural change toward “LGBTQ rights.”
After her impending violent death, she writes, “The caccoon [sic] of my old self will die when I leave my body behind and the boy in me will be free; in the butterfly transformation; the real me. If God won’t give me a boy body in heaven, then Jesus is a f*****.”
Hale appeared to draw an inverted cross and 666 next to that line.
Hale also despaired over politics, in an entry praising everything from transgender ideology to the Second Amendment. A journal entry on February 20, 2023, on politics declares, that “now in America, it makes one a criminal to have a gun or, be transgender, or non-binary. … Soon this g******** country will turn out no fun like England or Europe. No guns, no gender rights, no freedom of speech or pursuing of radical ideas, no mischeif [sic]. … Disabled have rights. Civil races have rights. LGBTQ have rights. Gun owners have rights. … So now because of all of you, I wish death on myself ‘cause of the pure hatred of my female gender. With no rights, anyone’s country is a s***** dictatorship.”
Her writings clearly indicate that she held no belief in human exceptionalism. It is “human nature to kill. Humans kill humans and themselves. Animals kill animals. Bugs kill bugs.”
In a previously unreleased passage seemingly inspired by critical race theory, she continues her view that death is a redeeming aspect of nature. The “deconstruction” of “nature” will undo “racism, gay killings, poverty, asylums.” The “reconstruction” will “change” those things into “civil rights, LGBTQ rights, food banks, [American] Disabilities Act.” Sex will transform into “safe sex,” AIDS into “medical care,” gun violence into “gun laws,” and “death” into “life.”
At one point, Hale refers to herself as a “white nothingness” and draws a schematic drawing of her mind. Her brain produced thoughts of “white privilege [sic], an embarrassment to self.”
The 28-year-old Hale obsessed over “brown girls” and repeatedly writes, “No brown girls, no love.”
“I am nothing. Brown love is the most beautiful kind,” she writes. In a previously unreleased drawing, Hale sketches a diagram of anal sex with “a beautiful young brown girl with a big a**” but realizes it will never happen. “Too bad I am a sad boy born w/a puny vagina.” She came to realize she would never have a relationship with most women, who are attracted to men, not women who identify as men. It is a “major blow to girls: I am a boy that has no penis,” she writes.
“I will be of no use of love for any girl if I don’t have what they need: boy’s body / male gender,” she writes. “If there is no love, there is no life. And no life is feeling dead. It’s only natural, wanting to die.”
The writings reveal Hale’s deep commitment to transgender ideology, so much that her birth gender had the power to ruin her day. “A terrible feeling to know I am nothing of the gender I was born of. I am the most unhappy boy alive. I wish to be dead,” she writes. “I hate society [because] society ignores to see me. I’m a queer; I’m meant to die.”
On February 21, she felt happy a worker at a comic book store called her “bud” and “bro,” but it made her feel “embarrassed of my female body. I SHOULD NOT BE IN THIS BODY!!!”
“My body doesn’t make me a female,” she asserts. “When I’m called a lady and ma’am — d*** it, it makes me not want to exist. The [male] body in me exists only to me. I’m just d*** tired of being called & identified by a gender I am not AT ALL. … disgusted at being in a female body. Makes me think about dying.”
On March 8, she writes, “I need a transdoctor … This female role makes me want to not exist … My therapist now is the best I could get 4 autism.”
She also bashed her parents for trying to bring positive, Christian influences into her life. In a passage dedicated to a friend, Hale complains:
“Aren’t parents manipulative? It’s total ignorance when parents step in and try to change their child’s environment. Make them go to youth group & force Christian friends into thier [sic] life because the old ones were a ‘bad’ influence. … Parents actually believe religion can change nature. That could explain why I don’t practice religion anymore. Let kids think for themselves … Kids are not robots. We are the future. That’s how it’s ment [sic] to be.”
She blasted her parents, especially her mother, who do not entirely and immediately affirm their child’s chosen gender identity, blaming it on “thier [sic] preference of conservative religion — gay s***.” Parents should be “willing to listen to their children, not the other way around.” Speaking of puberty blockers, “I’d kill to have those resources.”
A March 11 entry titled “My Imaginary Penis” carries Hale’s transgender ideology to its furthest extent. “My penis exists in my head. I swear to god I’m a male,” she writes, illustrating her journal with a crude image and describing her fantasy of committing sodomy on another woman. During her “tortured” childhood, she “tried to be feminine. But that didn’t last long after high school ended and no longer had to fear being called a dyke or a f*****. It was only until my early 20s I finally found the answer — that changing one’s gender is possible.”
She began “thinking of porn and doing surgery on my boy stuffed animals,” who identify as male but had no male anatomy. “I can pretend to be them [and] do the things boys do [and] experience my boy self as Tony.” Eventually, she realized this consumed too many of her waking hours. “I am such a pervert,” she writes. “I waste too much time in my fantasies.”
Much of the notebook is dedicated to “P.A.P.,” an apparent reference to Paige Patton, who played basketball with Audrey in eighth grade and stayed in touch periodically. Other pages are dedicated to a deceased fellow teammate. Patton, now a Nashville radio host who goes by the name Averianna, revealed that Hale texted her a message the morning of the shooting stating, “I'm planning to die today.” Patton asked Hale not to harm herself and called the suicide prevention hotline, which suggested she inform the police — who did not see the message until that afternoon.
In an entry dated last February 20, she wrote, “It’s infamous to die young! Dying young is my destiny.” On March 2, she wrote that her friend “will live a legend and I will die a shooter — hopefully to become infamous. No one will forget neither [sic] of us. She will be the blessing, and I will be the horror to inflict pain.”
“If I ever cry all day, it’s ‘cause I need your love,” says one page. “All I see is you. … I yearn for you,” she writes. In an entry to her departed friend she writes, “maybe, just maybe you’ll give a kiss to me in heaven. God knows I can’t get it down here. … I’d die to know, Literally.”
“Audrey is not my name but when you say it I am just the little 1 I was back then. I can be a kid again … even if I can’t really be with you,” she writes. “God is love, so are you.”
“There is a better place than being in these bodies, forced to live in [them],” she continues. “You like showing yours. I’m in the wrong body … so … I can’t wait to get there.”
Yet Hale, who began psychological counseling at age six and remained in counseling until her death, felt her neurodivergence held her back. “Love cannot be real if my autism is,” she writes. “Love will find me once my body loses me. (I will be whole again.)”
“I’m told I’m bi-polar by some prideful b****. No one gets me. Everyone misunderstands autism,” she complains at another time.
“I think God will enter me in heaven. If do get there, I’ll be waiting there for you,” she writes to Patton. “I’ve always been different. … My thoughts are a neverending abyss. A DARK ONE.” In another entry, Hale referred to herself as a “cursed soul.”
“Idc [I don’t care] if people die as I am the shooter because I am going 2 die too,” she vows. “My only true motivation = mass suicide [leading to] death.”
Hale infamously hated her father and intended to return home to murder him. In an entry titled “Dad problems,” she writes: “I hate his old cranky-man existance [sic]. All cranky good-for-nothing mentally ill men SHOULD DIE. They’re useless pieces of s***. … I DON’T CARE IF YOU DIE. I WANT TO KILL YOU.” Later, she adds, “A whole day w/o a father will be a better day …”
“I’m sorry innocent lives will be taken,” she writes on March 13, two weeks before the mass murder. She adds she has honed “a plan to near perfection.”
The octagon shape — which is sometimes black with a white cross — appears to represent “dark abyss, my only existence [sic].” She continues, “I think about death every day & fascinated/curious with the idea of dying too much. I know it’s unhealthy, but I just don’t care if it is anymore. … It’s too late now. I’m ready to die.”
Hale makes a number of references to the Columbine high school shooting. “I want my massacre to end in a way that Eric & Dylan would be proud of,” she writes. She also notes the date of the shooting in the notebook.
At one point near the shooting, she refers to herself as “just A.E. (not Audrey Elizabeth). I don’t like that name, never have, never will.”
She left explicit instructions for the news media to refer to her by her transgender name, Aiden, “For media: ‘A.’ A.E. (legal initials). Aiden (illegal name haha). A.E. Hale. Aiden Hale,” she writes. The legacy media strangely insisted on referring to the trans-identified mass child murderer by her birth name and reported that her gender identity was fuzzy.
As time went on, Hale’s resolve strengthened. On the morning of the shooting, March 27, she writes, “Forgive me God. This act will be inglorious.”
On “Death Day,” Hale confesses, “Don’t know how I was able to get this far, but here I am.” She adds, “There were several times I could have been caught, especially back in the summer of 2021.”
“Can’t believe I’m doing this, but I’m ready … I hope my victims aren’t.”
“My only fear is if anything goes wrong. I’ll do my best to prevent anything of the sort. (God let my wrath take over my anxiety),” The killer wrote. “It might be 10 minutes. It might be 3-7. It’s gonna go quick. I hope I have a high death count.”
The journal goes on, “Ready to die haha Aiden.”
These writings are different from a spiral-bound notebook police found in Hale’s vehicle at the scene of the crime. That other writing has yet to be released in its entirety. Conservative activist Steven Crowder obtained and released two pages of the spiral-bound notebook, including a “Death Day” itinerary of Hale’s shooting plans and poem dated February 3, 2023, titled “Kill those kids!!!” which reads in its entirety:
“Kill those kids!!!
Those crackers [an anti-white slur],
Going to private fancy schools
With those fancy khakis & sports backpacks,
With their daddies’ mustangs & convertibles.
F*** you little sh***
I wish to shoot you weak a** d**** with your mop yellow hair,
Wanna kill all you little crackers!!!
Bunch of little f******
W/your white privileges.
F*** you f******.”
It is not clear how many more pages of the spiral-bound notebook remain unreleased. You can download the full red Mead notebook from The Tennessee Star here. [SOURCE]
The neighbors — a group of computer savants and vegan activists committed to the study of human cognition, most of them trans women — moved box trucks on his land. It seemed like a win-win for the free-spirited Lind: They needed a place to stay, and he had a dream of making a little money by transforming his ramshackle lot into cheap housing for artists, woodworkers and other “makers” who were being squeezed by Bay Area prices.
“We talked a lot, and I thought we were good friends,” Lind said in a 2024 interview with The Times. “They were going to stay at my yard for four months.”
That’s not what happened. The pandemic hit. The tenants, according to Lind, stopped paying rent. And in 2022, when Lind, then 80, tried to evict them, some of those same tenants staged a brutal attack, slashing his body and stabbing out an eye, according to a criminal complaint filed by Solano County prosecutors. With a samurai sword still lodged in his body, Lind whipped out a gun and shot back, wounding one tenant and killing another.
And then, the story really took a turn.
Because as horror-movie Gothic as a samurai sword attack on an octogenarian in a desolate corner of the San Francisco Bay might sound, it was only the first in a series of alleged violent crimes that law enforcement authorities have linked to members of the strange group Lind had welcomed into his motley community.
Over the past few years, several members of the group have been investigated, criminally charged or deemed persons of interest in incidents that resulted in six deaths across the U.S. The parents of one of the vegan associates, Michelle Zajko, were slain in the dark of night in their stately home in suburban Pennsylvania in late December 2022. Zajko, who authorities allege had a pistol similar to the one used in the crime, has been named a person of interest in their deaths. She has not been charged.
Last month, a Border Patrol agent was shot to death on a snowy Vermont highway during a shootout with two other associates of the group, Felix “Ophelia” Bauckholt, a German national, and computer science student Teresa Youngblut, 21. Bauckholt was also killed in the shootout, and Youngblut arrested.
And then there was Lind: He had survived the samurai attack and loss of an eye, and was preparing to testify against the tenants charged in his assault. But three days before the Vermont shootout, Lind was knifed to death in broad daylight outside his Vallejo lot. Another person with links to the group, Maximilian Snyder, a graduate of an elite Seattle prep school, was charged with Lind's murder and trying to silence a witness. Snyder has not yet entered a plea.
Authorities in jurisdictions across the country have said little about the group or what evidence they have gathered in the far-flung cases. But court records, blog posts and interviews with family members and acquaintances paint a picture of a group whose members splintered from the Bay Area's rationalist community — an intellectual movement exploring the underpinnings of human reasoning — and allegedly turned violent.
In the Bay Area's rationalist community, they are known as the Zizians, a reference to Jack "Ziz" LaSota, a trans woman whose prolific blogging attracted a following. Many of her adherents attended fancy schools, are gifted with computers and worry about the dangers of artificial intelligence. They were often seen dressed all in black, or sometimes, wearing almost nothing at all.
By many accounts, the origins of the group go back almost a decade, to the time when LaSota, a computer science graduate from Alaska, landed in the Bay Area.
LaSota, who is now 34 and uses feminine pronouns, would at one point be declared lost at sea, then turn up very much alive near the scene of violent crimes on both coasts. She has not been charged in any of the killings.
But this was well in the future. In 2016, she was, as she wrote in her blog, hoping to "contribute to saving the world." It was rough going. She was fired from a job at a gaming startup and struggled to afford Bay Area housing.
She eventually landed on unemployment, according to her blog, and developed a kinship with another trans computer whiz, Gwen Danielson, who was affiliated with the Berkeley-based Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a nonprofit focused on safe development of artificial intelligence.
Danielson, who comes from a family of engineers and intellects, had gotten a full-ride scholarship to Rice University. Her father, Brett, said she was working on three degree programs — neuroscience, neurological engineering and electrical engineering — but dropped out after a year and a half.
"There was something really deep I hadn't had before in being able to just think and bounce ideas off someone equally interested in schemes to save the world for weeks on end," LaSota wrote of Danielson.
LaSota also began to believe, according to her blog, that the astronomically high housing prices in the Bay Area were an impediment to "anyone who wanted to actually try to save the world."
The friends hit on an elegant answer: They hatched a plan to acquire old boats and use them for housing. They called it "The Rationalist Fleet." Brett Danielson, Gwen's father, said he allowed his daughter, LaSota and a third person to join his cellphone plan so they could run their operations.
In 2017, LaSota, Danielson and others acquired a World War II-era tugboat, the Caleb, and sailed it down from Alaska to Half Moon Bay.
The group grew to include Emma Borhanian, a talented programmer who had moved from North Carolina to San Francisco for a job at Google. After rising in the ranks, her mother wrote on social media, Borhanian “retired” in her mid-20s and dedicated her life to "animal rights, transgender rights and AI safety."
But the dream of building a utopian community of rationalist boat dwellers did not come to fruition, Brett Danielson said, in part because another member of the partnership with deeper pockets left. Also: maintaining old boats to the satisfaction of local authorities is really hard.
Almost immediately, the Caleb was in trouble with the law, according to San Mateo County public records. In October 2017, Coast Guard officials warned Gwen Danielson of the environmental dangers posed by the boat, noting it had “around 3,000 gallons of diesel fuel on board along with other hazardous petroleum products.” Two weeks later, the Coast Guard declared the boat “an imminent threat to the public health or welfare of the environment.”
As the group struggled to sort out their boat troubles, LaSota's blog posts — dense pronouncements on rational decision-making meshed with earnest personal stories — drew in more followers. She eventually broke off from the larger rationalist community, penning posts critical of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and the Center for Applied Rationality.
In 2019, LaSota, Danielson, Borhanian and one other member of the group took this philosophical rift to the redwood forests of western Sonoma County. On the afternoon of Nov. 15, according to law enforcement reports, sheriff’s deputies got a call about a group of people dressed in black robes and Guy Fawkes masks outside Westminster Woods, a retreat center where the Center for Applied Rationality was holding a gathering. According to local news accounts, the robed intruders passed out fliers asserting the center “no longer aspires to teach the true path of rationality, if it ever did.”
The four were arrested on multiple charges, including trespassing and wearing a mask while committing a crime.
Brett Danielson said he maintained only sporadic communication with his daughter, but he did hear from her after the arrest. He said his daughter told him the group had been peaceful, and alleged abuse at the hands of authorities. The group later filed a federal civil rights lawsuit over the incident.
He feared his daughter was going down a dangerous path. Nevertheless, he helped pay her legal bills and hoped the trouble would pass.
It was around this time that some members of the larger rationalist community began to raise alarms.
"The purpose of this document is to warn you not to join them!" one person wrote on a site called Zizians.info. "Ziz is a master manipulator; she is extremely skilled at selling people on nonsense ideas about decision theory and ethics that defy not just the 'rules of rationality' but basic common sense."
As their cases moved through Sonoma County courts, the group's boat in Half Moon Bay continued to generate conflict with authorities. As it happened, one of their neighbors in the harbor, Lind, was familiar with the Caleb.
“It used to belong to one of my best friends,” said Lind, who had a long history of acquiring old boats.
Lind could sympathize with their regulatory troubles. Over the years he had faced his own issues because of his devotion to dilapidated vessels from bygone eras. He had recently been embroiled in a dispute with officials over the MS Aurora, a 70-year-old cruise ship that had been an inspiration for the TV show "The Love Boat." “It’s a sickness,” he told The Times of his love for old ships.
When Lind sold his own boat, the Robert Gray, a 120-foot Army Corps survey boat, and moved to his trailer lot in Vallejo, the Zizians came along, moving into box trucks and trailers. But the harmony of their communal solution to the housing crisis was soon replaced by acrimony, especially as the unpaid rent began to accrue.
“We were all concerned about it,” said Lind’s good friend, Thomas Young, who lived with Lind on the Robert Gray.
Young said he dined with Lind at least once a week, and his troublesome tenants were a frequent topic.
“They did all kinds of things to be unpleasant,” Young said, adding that Lind believed they threw rocks at his trailer in the middle of the night to disturb him, and also “would parade around during the day, half naked, just to shock the neighborhood more than anything. He just wanted them out.”
But with the pandemic raging, no one was going anywhere.
Meanwhile, Danielson, at that point the registered owner of the Caleb, was under increasing pressure to relocate the listing tugboat. In May 2022, shortly after group members stopped responding to authorities' entreaties, the boat sank.
And then another shocking development: In August of that year, Borhanian and a companion placed urgent calls for help, saying LaSota had fallen off another boat into San Francisco Bay and disappeared into the watery depths. Rescue teams searched and found no trace of her.
“Jack Amadeus LaSota left our lives but not our hearts on Aug. 19 after a boating accident. Loving adventure, friends and family, music, blueberries, biking, computer games and animals, you are missed,” read the obituary in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.
Around the same time, Danielson, too, went missing.
In fall 2022, with the pandemic waning, Lind got a judge to issue an eviction notice for his tenants.
“The court awarded me some $60-odd thousand,” he recalled in a 2024 interview with The Times. “I didn’t think they had any money, so I didn’t go after that. But I could kick them out for non-payment.”
A week before the sheriff was scheduled to come, Lind said, his tenants asked if they could stay for two more months. “I told them ‘No.’"
He had a bad feeling about it, he said, and so he began carrying a gun.
Around 2 a.m. on Nov. 13, 2022, another friend of Lind’s, Patrick McMillan, who also lived at his property, was inside his own trailer when he saw someone outside wearing a headlamp, he would later tell police.
Knowing of the dispute with the Zizian tenants, McMillan said he called Lind. Lind asked him to call police, according to an account filed in court by prosecutors. McMillan called 911, according to the account, but police did not come.
Hours later, around sunrise, McMillan told authorities, he was rousted from his bed by Lind's panicked screams. McMillan said he opened his door and beheld Lind holding a gun and bleeding from multiple wounds.
His tenants had stabbed him, he later told The Times, echoing allegations prosecutors would bring in a criminal complaint, so "I pulled out this pistol and started shooting."
Police did respond this time. Borhanian had been fatally shot. Another group member, Alex “Somni” Leatham, was wounded but survived. A third person, identified as Suri Dao in court papers, was on scene, but not wounded.
Police arrested Leatham and Dao and charged them with assaulting Lind. They also charged them with the felony murder of Borhanian, though Lind had shot her, because of their role in the attack.
From behind bars, Leatham has repeatedly written to the court professing innocence. Dao's attorney, Brian Ford, told The Times that the "trial hasn't happened yet. When it does, and all the evidence is presented, when the dust settles, everyone is going to realize Suri is not overly involved in any of this."
There was someone else on scene the night Lind was stabbed: LaSota. Not dead after all. The revelation came in court papers filed by an attorney in the Sonoma County case.
Lind did not name LaSota as one of the tenants involved in the attack. She was not charged.
Less than two months later, the parents of Zizian associate Michelle Zajko were murdered on the other side of the country.
Rita Zajko, 69, and Richard Zajko, 72, were discovered shot in their bedroom in suburban Philadelphia on Jan. 2, 2023.
A subsequent police investigation, detailed by the Boston Globe, revealed that two people had parked a car in the couple's driveway just before midnight on New Year’s Eve. At some point, according to footage from a Ring camera, someone shouted “Mom.”
An investigation into their deaths led Pennsylvania state troopers to the Candlewood Suites in nearby Chester City on Jan. 12, 2023. Michelle Zajko was staying there, and authorities were searching for the gun used to kill her parents, according to court testimony.
Instead, while searching a second room associated with Zajko, they found LaSota. In an affidavit, State Trooper Matthew Smith, using male pronouns, said LaSota “immediately became limp, closed his eyes, and refused to comply with any commands.”
LaSota, who Smith said is 6-foot-2 and around 200 pounds, was physically carried into a nearby hospital, where a doctor said there was nothing medically wrong. Yet, according to Smith, LaSota would not “open his eyes, walk, or move on his own or make any verbal announcements.”
LaSota was charged with disorderly conduct. After being released, she failed to appear for a court hearing, according to the Delaware County district attorney’s office. A warrant was issued, but once again, LaSota was gone.
Meanwhile, back in the Bay Area, Dao and Leatham, the two charged with stabbing Lind, were giving California officials all manner of trouble.
Leatham was accused of trying to escape from custody twice, on Nov. 28, 2022, and again on Feb. 6, 2023, according to court documents. Dao was accused of trying to escape in the summer of 2023.
As authorities on both coasts worked their cases, Brett Danielson said he heard from his daughter Gwen for the first time in years.
"'I'm in hiding; I'm under an alias, please don't divulge where I am, or that I'm even alive,'” he said she told him.
Lind, meanwhile, was trying to move on with his life. He had children, grandchildren and a host of friends who were helping him recover. And prosecutors were counting on him to provide crucial testimony in the case against his former tenants.
Lind and his supporters were anxious to put the episode behind them. Young said that after the sword attack, he had entered the tenants' trucks and found dozens of computers, all expertly encrypted. “I’m an engineer,” Young said. “I can recognize the high level of skill these people had.”
On Jan. 16, Solano County prosecutors asked the court to speed up the trial date, noting that Lind was 82.
The next day, a man dressed in black and purple accosted Lind outside his Vallejo property and cut his throat as neighbors watched in horror. The old ship captain was dead. The man who killed him fled on foot.
Young said he is convinced someone wanted to keep Lind from testifying. He said he called and emailed Vallejo police, informing them that he still had all those computers and hard drives the tenants had left behind. Perhaps they would prove useful in figuring out who these people were.
But no one got back to him, he said. It wasn't until late February, after he complained to local media, he said, that the district attorney's office called.
On Jan. 14, a hotel employee in Vermont called law enforcement to report that two young people had checked into the hotel and were acting oddly — wearing black tactical-style clothing and carrying a gun.
Investigators spoke briefly with the pair, whom they identified as Youngblut and Bauckholt, who claimed they were in the area to look at property, according to a law enforcement affidavit filed in federal court.
On the afternoon of Jan. 20, Border Patrol agents pulled the pair over as they drove along Interstate 91 in a Prius. Youngblut, the driver, allegedly drew a handgun and fired, according to the affidavit. In the subsequent exchange of fire, both Bauckholt and Border Patrol Agent David Maland were killed. Maland, 44, was an avid outdoorsman and engaged to be married, according to his obituary.
