Ex-Lakeside students charged in killings now linked to string of deaths

They went to high school at one of Seattle’s most-fabled private schools. Then they went their separate ways, both to elite colleges where they studied computer science.

Former classmates at North Seattle’s Lakeside School aren’t sure if Maximilian Snyder, 22, and Teresa Youngblut, 21, ever interacted when they were students there. But they found each other again online and recently applied to get married.

Now they find themselves in prison cells, on opposite sides of the country.

Snyder, of Kirkland, has been charged with murder in the stabbing death of an 82-year-old man in Vallejo, Calif. Prosecutors say Snyder killed the man to prevent his testimony in an upcoming murder trial. 

Youngblut, of Seattle, faces two weapons charges in connection with a shootout in rural Vermont that killed a Border Patrol agent. Prosecutors asked that Youngblut be held without bail, saying her case is linked to the Vallejo killing and to a 2022 double homicide in a Philadelphia suburb.

A federal magistrate judge on Thursday ordered Youngblut be held until trial. Her parents, from Seattle, sat silently in the second row of the courthouse, according to local media.

Youngblut and Snyder and the people they associated with are linked, prosecutors and police say, to five deaths across the country in the last three years.

And the cases seem to have ties to a vegan extremist movement whose leader goes by “Ziz” and was reported dead in 2022. 

Until, court records say, Ziz resurfaced a few months later at another homicide scene.

A person of interest and a gun

Youngblut was traveling with a German man last week when they were pulled over by a Border Patrol agent in Coventry, Vt., about 20 miles from the Canadian border. 

The stop in Coventry was a routine immigration inspection, prosecutors wrote, but without notice, Youngblut got out of the car and opened fire. At least one agent fired back. The German man pulled a gun, but was shot and killed. Border Patrol Agent David “Chris” Maland was killed in the shootout.

Prosecutors say the gun Youngblut was carrying was bought in rural Vermont by a person of interest in the killing of a husband and wife at their home in Chester Heights, Pa., on New Year’s Eve in 2022.

That killing remains unsolved.

California connections

Youngblut and the person who bought her the gun were also in “frequent contact” with another person, prosecutors wrote. That person had been detained in the double killing in Pennsylvania and is also a person of interest in a 2022 killing in Vallejo. 

There were two killings in Vallejo: the one in 2022 and one last month that Snyder is charged with. Both involve an 82-year-old man named Curtis Lind.

In 2022, prosecutors say Lind was attacked by three young people who were tenants on his property. He was stabbed with a sword and lost an eye, but survived. In the course of the attack he pulled a gun and shot at his alleged assailants, killing Emma Borhanian.

Prosecutors have charged the other two alleged assailants — Alexander Leatham and Suri Dao — with murder and attempted murder. They were set to go to trial in April. Lind was to be the star witness.

But on Jan. 17, Lind was stabbed and killed outside his property. A week later, Snyder was arrested and charged with murder, with prosecutors saying Snyder killed Lind explicitly to prevent him from testifying.

A fringe movement

Leatham and Borhanian had both been arrested previously, in 2019, at a bizarre protest in the Bay Area that also featured Jack “Ziz” LaSota.

Protesters dressed in black robes and Guy Fawkes masks — made famous by the movie “V for Vendetta” — were arrested for allegedly barricading a retreat hosted by the Center for Applied Rationality, a Berkeley, Calif., nonprofit that offers workshops on rational decision-making skills, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.  

LaSota is considered to be the leader of a group known as “Zizians” that appears to be an offshoot of “rationalists,” a movement focused on decision-making based on scientific reason, stripped of biases. Zizians appear to be specifically concerned with animal rights and ensuring that AI models are aligned with human values.

Jessica Taylor, a Berkeley resident who works in AI and is familiar with the rationalist movement and its offshoots, said LaSota and followers “have strong ethical beliefs, including ethical veganism, and anarchist-inflected political beliefs.”

LaSota died in 2022, according to an online obituary. A Coast Guard incident report details a two-day search after LaSota had reportedly fallen off a sailboat in San Francisco Bay. But no body was found.

Jerold Friedman, an attorney who represented LaSota, said LaSota’s mother told him LaSota had died.

But in 2022, two days after Lind was stabbed for the first time, Friedman got an email from a prosecutor saying LaSota was contacted by police in Vallejo and was “on scene, alive and well.”

And court records show LaSota was arrested in 2023 in the Philadelphia suburbs, two weeks after the double homicide there, and charged with obstructing law enforcement and disorderly conduct. Court records show LaSota is awaiting trial but the case is marked as inactive.

“He found me on Instagram”

Six former classmates of Snyder and Youngblut who talked to The Seattle Times on condition of anonymity were not sure whether the two interacted while they attended Lakeside School. 

Shortly after Youngblut graduated from high school in 2022, she told a friend she’d connected with Snyder after he reached out to her over Instagram, according to messages shared with The Times.

“He found me on Instagram and we’ve been talking,” Youngblut wrote. “It’s very nice.” 

During his senior year, Snyder was voted “Most Likely to Already Be a Spy” in the high school’s 2020 yearbook. Snyder’s former classmates have described him as someone who “did not have a lot of friends” and “liked to be controversial in class.” 

One former classmate, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation, took classes with Snyder and traveled to Tibet with him and a group of 11 students for a monthlong Global Service Learning trip offered by Lakeside in 2018.  

“I tried to be his friend, but he had quite high standards of others around him,” the former classmate said. “He had very strong beliefs about what was moral and what wasn’t, what was good, who was good.” 

Members of Snyder’s graduating class, all of whom requested to remain anonymous out of fear for their safety, said the last time they heard from Snyder was in summer 2021, as part of a large group messaging thread with about 50 former classmates.   

After graduating from Lakeside in 2020, Snyder attended the University of Oxford to study computer science and philosophy, according to his social media profiles and former classmates.

Youngblut was in orchestra and choir at Lakeside, and was Quiz Bowl captain during her senior year. 

“I find it beyond shocking,” Zane Nagel, a former classmate, said of the recent news. “Teresa was the good, kindhearted girl with the pink hair that sat next to me at advisory.”  

Youngblut went to the University of Washington where she studied computer science, according to social media profiles. In May 2024, Youngblut’s parents tried to file a missing persons report with the Seattle Police Department after Youngblut left the house with duffel bags, her passport and medical records. 

Youngblut’s parents reported she was acting out of character, saying she had “become deceptive” and had broken off childhood friendships. They also raised concerns that she might be in an abusive relationship, though the report did not say with whom. 

Neighbors said Youngblut’s parents went door to door asking if anyone had seen her. One neighbor said Youngblut’s parents mentioned a vegan documentary and said Youngblut had been “researching rationalism.”

It’s unclear where Youngblut went when she left. She had been living in Chapel Hill, N.C., since November 2024, The Associated Press reported, where she’d paid a landlord nearly $10,000 to stay through March. Living just down the street was the German man who was killed in the Vermont shootout with Border Patrol.

Youngblut and Snyder filed a marriage license application in King County in November. It’s unclear if they actually got married.