The group was passionately vegan, mostly transgender and highly educated. Seven of them are now in jail. This is the story of one who did not survive.
The New York Times
October 2, 2025 at 8:29PM
Astra Kolomatskaia, left, with her roommate and friend Ophelia Bauckholt. The Zizians were passionately vegan, mostly transgender and highly educated. Seven are now in jail. One, Bauckholt, is dead. State and federal law enforcement officials are still trying to piece together a bizarre saga involving the deaths of six people in three states. (Astra Kolomatskaia/The New York Times)
A 10-year-old blue Toyota Prius was rocketing through northern Vermont on the afternoon of Jan. 20 when a U.S. Border Patrol agent pulled it over for an immigration inspection.
Law enforcement officers had been watching the two people inside the car for the better part of a week, since a hotel employee reported that they were armed and dressed in tactical gear. Shortly before the Prius was stopped, officers watched them buy aluminum foil at a Walmart and wrap it around their phones.
Now, on a stretch of highway flanked by snow-crusted ground and hardwood forest, one of the agents asked them to get out of the car.
There seemed little explanation for what happened next. The driver of the Prius was a U.S. citizen with no criminal record. The passenger, a German national, had an H-1B visa, reserved for highly skilled workers. Items found in the car might have suggested a dark purpose but were not illicit: a ballistic helmet, a night-vision monocular, full-face respirators and hollow-point ammunition.
Yet without warning, according to an FBI affidavit, the driver drew a Glock pistol and opened fire. A Border Patrol agent fired back. The passenger also reached for a gun, according to an incident summary by the Border Patrol. The agent ordered the passenger to stop. The demand was ignored, and the agent shot at the passenger, too, the summary said.
The driver went down, struck in the arm and the leg. The passenger, hit twice in the chest, died at the scene. A Border Patrol agent took a bullet in the neck. He was rushed to the hospital but did not survive.
The driver was identified as Teresa Youngblut, 21, a University of Washington computer science student who had been reported missing by her parents eight months earlier. Prosecutors have cited her “associations with individuals suspected of violent acts” — namely, the shooting deaths of an older couple in their suburban Philadelphia home in 2023 and the fatal stabbing of an 82-year-old man who was to be the central witness in a trial in California.
Eight months later, state and federal law enforcement officials are still trying to piece together a bizarre saga involving the deaths of six people in three states. Seven members of a group that was passionately vegan, mostly transgender, highly educated and following a charismatic and confessional blogger who called herself Ziz are now in jail, awaiting trial on charges ranging from trespass to murder. As the death count mounted, the story of what some news reports called a “murder cult” attracted national attention.
The Zizians, as they became known, were a contentious faction within a tech-heavy subculture known as the Rationalists, who are preoccupied with the dangers of artificial intelligence. The Zizians believed that veganism was essential to preventing an AI doomsday and that the Rationalist establishment was hypocritical and covering up abuse and corruption.
But the passenger in the Prius that January day did not share the Zizians’ most outlandish beliefs or outsider status. A transgender woman known as Ophelia Bauckholt, she was a 28-year-old, highly paid analyst at a Manhattan trading firm, balancing a brimming social life with a devotion to helping vulnerable people. Her many friends have puzzled over the persistent mystery of how and why she vanished from New York City and, more than a year later, ended up dead on Interstate 91.
“Her life was clearly falling apart. She was really stressed, and she didn’t tell anyone about what was going on, and then she disappeared,” said Astra Kolomatskaia, a close friend. “So the story kind of cuts off there.”
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Bauckholt arrived in New York City in 2021 for a new job that friends said paid at least $500,000 a year. Brilliant and frolicsome, she plunged into the city’s Rationalist scene, usually accompanied by an entourage of other trans women. She socked away money to give to charity, living on a tenth of her income.
A photo posted on social media after her death shows a grinning face with sunglasses and windblown, curly dark hair.
Still, she was far from ascetic. Her life was a heady mix of financial freedom, like-minded new friends and the “second puberty” brought on by hormone therapy. There were parties and polycules, experiments with injectable estrogen and a transcranial magnetic stimulation machine that Bauckholt and her friends used to activate parts of their brains.
At the beginning of her senior year, she donated $5,000 to purchase 1,100 mosquito nets. The nets would save approximately 1.4 lives, she posted on Facebook, along with a link to the underlying data. “I just finished my first tech internship (it was amazing!),” she wrote, “and I wanted to pay some of it forward.”
Bauckholt was embracing the principles of what is known as effective altruism, which encourages people to make sure their effect on the world is “net positive,” either by working for a good cause or taking a high-paying job in order to fund good causes.
The effective altruism movement heavily overlaps with Rationalism, a movement that at its core is an endeavor to think better. Rationalists, whose aspirations are evident in names like LessWrong, a community forum, and Overcoming Bias, a New York City meetup group, try to minimize cognitive errors and constantly “update” their “cached” opinions based on new information.
In part because of the community’s devotion to open-mindedness, it attracts high numbers of trans and neurodivergent people. For the same reason, some participants flirt with extreme right ideology. Like the tech world more generally, the community is male-dominated and has been accused of encouraging norms of social and sexual freedom that provide cover for abusive behavior.
Bauckholt, who used the online handle @orellanin, a toxin found in mushrooms, was a playful and sometimes naive participant in online Rationalist debates. In a thread about the inadequacy of responses to the question, “Why did you transition?” her list of reasons included “upset about my aging face,” “lanky tall girls are really pretty and there should be more of them,” “my body slowly changing in these preprogrammed ways just seemed really exciting” and “straight relationships are terrifying (not sure if this was a real reason or something I’m making up now).”
Another time, Bauckholt wrote, “I think of intelligence+integrity as an explosive combo. I’m drawn to people because of ongoing explosions or a sense that something might explode around them.”
Bauckholt became secretive about her relationship to the Zizians. “At this point I don’t feel like telling you whether I’m friends with Ziz or not,” she wrote in a Discord chat, “but I do want to note that I’ve never said I was friends with Ziz.”
At the same time, she told another person that she had contributed money to help with Silver’s legal defense, according to Kolomatskaia. “She is very naive, and she’s very trusting,” Kolomatskaia said. “She gives people the benefit of the doubt, and also believes that a lot of systems in the world are unjust; like, ‘the criminal justice system is unjust’ was one of her main beliefs.”
U.S. Border Patrol Agent David “Chris” Maland, 44, was shot and killed during a traffic stop near the Canadian border Jan. 20. He is a native of Blue Earth and graduate of Fairmont High School in Minnesota. (Provided/Joan Maland)
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In June 2023, Ziz was released from jail in Pennsylvania. Around that time, Bauckholt’s friends noticed a distinct change in her behavior. She started having frequent, secretive phone calls, according to Kolomatskaia.
She stopped going to work and began to leave town every weekend but did not say where she was going. “She was really stressed that summer,” Kolomatskaia said. “She wasn’t voluntarily, eagerly doing this.”
Other friends noticed, too. “I asked her what was going on, and she was just like, ‘It’s a private matter,’” Altman said. “And so I didn’t really pry into it, because I trusted Ophelia.”
In November, Bauckholt disappeared from the New York area entirely and stopped responding to messages.
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