Prosecutors say years of investigation uncovered evidence of a planned New Year’s Eve killing inside the family home.
A Pennsylvania woman linked to the violent extremist group known as the Zizians was charged Wednesday with orchestrating the shooting deaths of her parents inside their Chester Heights home on New Year’s Eve 2022 — a date that was also her 30th birthday.
Michelle Zajko, 33, faces charges of criminal homicide, first- and third-degree murder, conspiracy, burglary and firearms offenses in the deaths of Richard Zajko, 72, and Rita Zajko, 69, Delaware County District Attorney Tanner Rouse announced at a press conference. The victims were not discovered until the night of January 2, 2023, two days after they were killed — when family members called for a welfare check after Richard and Rita failed to show up to care for Rita’s elderly mother on two consecutive days.
The murders unfolded hours after Rita Zajko sent her daughter a text message that morning expressing regret over the estrangement that had grown between them and wishing her a happy birthday. That text went unanswered. Richard and Rita Zajko were shot inside Michelle’s childhood playroom at their home at 18 Highland Drive — a room still filled with toys, dolls and furniture from the 1990s, with a stitched picture on the wall bearing the inscription “Michelle Zajko” and a birth date of Dec. 31, 1992. Both victims died from single gunshot wounds to the head. Rita was shot in the back of the head. Richard died from a gunshot wound to the right temple and had a graze wound on his right hand, consistent with a defensive gesture. No firearm was recovered at the scene. No other rooms in the home were disturbed. Nothing appeared to have been taken.
“It was an exhaustive investigation, and it took years to pull together, but we are finally at the point where we can say beyond any doubt that Michelle Zajko was at least in part responsible for the death of her parents,” Rouse said. “She did not act alone.”
What the Evidence Shows
Investigators say Zajko was present at the home but has not been identified as the shooter. Rouse said authorities do not yet know who fired the fatal shots or who her co-conspirators were. A neighbor’s doorbell camera captured a vehicle parking outside the home at 11:29 p.m. on Dec. 31, two people exiting the car, and audio in which a voice calls out “Mom” and another responds, “Oh my God! Oh, God, God!” With the audio enhanced, investigators said the word “Mom” was unmistakable. Richard and Rita Zajko had only one child.
Shell casings recovered at the scene later matched a firearm Zajko had used at a shooting range behind her Vermont home. The two individuals who entered the home were inside for approximately nine minutes before leaving. Investigators also obtained text messages in which Zajko referred to things the group had “f***ed up,” including failing to collect the shell casings, not disposing of ammunition found at the Vermont home, and not sending decoy messages from a phone she had deliberately left behind in Vermont to construct a false alibi. That list was recovered from Zajko’s phone and was dated seven days after she, Blank and LaSota were arrested in Chester, Pennsylvania in January 2023.
Investigators noted it takes approximately seven and a half hours to drive from Vermont to Chester Heights. Cellphone records showed Zajko’s phone — along with those of her associates Daniel Blank and Jack LaSota — went unusually quiet during the hours leading up to the shooting. All three phones remained in Vermont.
During an interview with investigators shortly after the killings, Zajko said she had not spoken with her parents since approximately January 2022 and had not been in Pennsylvania since before the COVID-19 pandemic. She acknowledged owning a Smith & Wesson 9mm handgun and purchasing ammunition similar to that recovered at the crime scene. She provided the firearm for inspection; investigators noted it appeared recently cleaned or serviced. She did not provide 9mm Sig ammunition also found at her property. Evidence later obtained by investigators directly contradicted her account of her whereabouts.
Rouse called the killings deliberate and premeditated. “It does not seem to be a spur-of-the-moment operation,” he said. “There was clearly quite a bit of thought put into this. But it certainly wasn’t sloppy.”
The Fugitive Years
Zajko had become estranged from her parents in early 2022, the same year she relocated to Vermont and became affiliated with LaSota and Blank. In a January 2022 text message to her father, she had complained that her mother had “assumed the worst” about her since she was a child and wrote that every time she tried to have a real conversation with her mother, her mother spent the time “insulting a life she knows nothing about.” Those were among the last communications between them before the murders.
After the bodies were discovered, police questioned Zajko in Vermont. She later traveled to Pennsylvania for her parents’ funeral, where troopers briefly detained her at a hotel in Chester but released her without charges. LaSota, also staying at the hotel, lay motionless on the ground and refused to move when officers approached. Officers ultimately carried the 6-foot-2 LaSota out of the hotel. LaSota was charged with obstruction and disorderly conduct, posted $10,000 bail, and never appeared in court again.
Zajko then fled, abandoning her vehicle and $40,000 in cash found inside it. A bench warrant was issued after she failed to appear in court. Her whereabouts remained unknown for years.
Zajko and LaSota were finally located in February 2025, when a landowner in Frostburg, Maryland, reported two suspicious box trucks parked on his property in the 10,000 block of Piney Mountain Road. Officers found Zajko and LaSota inside one truck, dressed entirely in black and wearing gun belts loaded with ammunition. Blank was found in the second truck. All three were arrested by the Maryland State Police and Allegany County Sheriff’s Office and charged with trespassing and weapons and drug offenses. LaSota also faces a federal charge of illegal firearm possession by a fugitive. Zajko was additionally charged with resisting arrest. All three have remained jailed since and have pleaded not guilty.
The Vermont Shooting
The Pennsylvania murder charges are not the only serious legal exposure Zajko faces. Federal prosecutors in Vermont have charged her with supplying the firearms used in the January 20, 2025, killing of U.S. Border Patrol Agent David Maland during a traffic stop on Interstate 91 in Coventry, Vermont, roughly 20 miles from the Canadian border.
The stop began when an agent pulled over a blue Toyota Prius for an immigration inspection. Inside were Teresa Youngblut, 21, a University of Washington computer science student from Seattle, and Ophelia Bauckholt, 28, a German national and Manhattan trading firm analyst who friends said earned at least $500,000 a year and who had been reported missing by her parents eight months before the shooting. Law enforcement had been watching the pair for days — a hotel employee had reported them wearing tactical gear and appearing armed. Hours before the stop, officers watched them purchase aluminum foil at a Walmart in Newport, Vermont, and wrap it around their phones.
When the agent ordered them out of the car, Youngblut drew a Glock pistol and opened fire without warning, according to an FBI affidavit. Agent Maland was struck in the neck and did not survive. Bauckholt reached for her own weapon; agents shot her twice in the chest and she died at the scene. Youngblut was wounded in the arm and leg and survived. Items recovered from the car — a ballistic helmet, night-vision monocular, full-face respirators and hollow-point ammunition — suggested preparation for violence, though none were illegal on their own.
A federal grand jury returned a superseding indictment against Youngblut in August 2025 on four counts including murder, assault with a deadly weapon against two additional agents, and related firearms offenses. Attorney General Pamela Bondi personally authorized the pursuit of the death penalty. Youngblut has pleaded not guilty.
The ATF subsequently identified Zajko as the person who supplied the guns Youngblut and Bauckholt were carrying. Zajko has also been charged federally with making false statements when purchasing three firearms at a Vermont gun dealer, providing a false address on the paperwork. Two of those guns were used in the killing of Agent Maland.
Who the Zizians Are
The Zizians splintered off from the so-called rationalist community in Berkeley, California — a scene that attracts high-IQ technologists and academics obsessed with existential risk and artificial intelligence. What emerged from that milieu was something considerably darker.
The group, most of whose identified members are trans women in their 20s and 30s, operates on a belief system that fuses extreme veganism with a conviction that artificial intelligence will eventually dominate the earth, that humans should model ethical behavior by refusing to harm animals, and that trans women are intellectually and morally superior to other humans. Members have experimented with transcranial magnetic stimulation machines to activate parts of their brains and have practiced deliberately putting one hemisphere of their brain to sleep. Their leader, Jack “Ziz” LaSota, an Alaskan computer scientist, built the ideology through a blog and attracted followers who prosecutors say graduated from fringe philosophy to coordinated violence.
Ophelia Bauckholt — who died on Interstate 91 — was in many ways an outlier within the group. Friends described him as brilliant, generous and socially vibrant, living on a tenth of his Wall Street salary and donating the rest to charity. He was not rigid about pronouns, went by Felix at work and with family, and did not demand veganism of others. He had been reported missing by his parents eight months before his death. How and why he ended up in that Prius on a Vermont highway remains, for those who knew him, an unanswered question.
The group has now been connected to six deaths across three states since 2022. In November 2022, members attacked Curtis Lind, an 82-year-old landlord in Vallejo, California, with a samurai sword. Lind lost an eye but survived by shooting one of his alleged attackers dead. He lived long enough to be scheduled as the central witness in the resulting trial — and was stabbed to death outside his home in January 2025, days before he was set to testify. Maximilian Snyder has been charged in that murder. Three weeks later, Youngblut and Bauckholt encountered Agent Maland on Interstate 91. The Zajko parents were killed in between, on New Year’s Eve 2022, in a house that had once been their daughter’s childhood home.
Zajko’s Denial
In April 2025, Zajko’s attorney transmitted a 20-page handwritten document to the Associated Press that Zajko titled “Open Letter to the World.” In it she wrote plainly: “I didn’t murder my parents.” She pushed back on media coverage of the group, writing that she and her associates were “being described as like Satan’s lapdogs, the devil & the Manson family all rolled into one.” In separate court filings, she suggested her father may have shot her mother before turning the gun on himself and accused authorities of targeting the group to prevent members from assisting in the defense of Youngblut.
The Family Speaks
Richard Zajko’s sister-in-law, Rosanne Zajko, addressed reporters at Wednesday’s press conference on behalf of the family.
“In the three-plus years since the murders of our beloved Rick and Rita, we have lived with unspeakable grief and sorrow,” she said. “There were countless days of darkness and despair, days when it was difficult, almost impossible, to hold on to the belief and hope and expectation that this day would eventually arrive. We are deeply and forever grateful and thankful for those public servants who carried us through the dark days to this long-awaited day when charges would be filed.”
She added: “The evidence will speak loudly and decisively for us, as it will for Rick and Rita. Now is the time for the facts and the truth to be known.”
Rouse offered his own assessment. “I can’t wrap my mind around or figure out what led to this point,” he said. “We are clearly talking about someone that has gone down an unimaginably dark road and has led to a tragedy that just defies any sort of description.”
Zajko remains in custody in Maryland awaiting extradition to Pennsylvania. She also awaits trial on the Maryland charges alongside LaSota and Blank and faces separate federal charges in Vermont.
