Well, look who finally got hit with the murder book. Michelle Zajko, the star player of the terminal online doomer cult known as the "Zizians," has officially been charged with the 2022 Pennsylvania double homicide of her parents. Delaware County DA Tanner Rouse dropped the hammer on Wednesday, June 24, 2026, announcing charges of murder, burglary, and conspiracy. Rouse made sure to mention she didn't act alone, which is no surprise considering her circle of highly academic, highly unhinged tech-bro buddies.

For those who haven't been keeping up with this bizarre internet-poisoned circus, the Zizians are a group of "highly intelligent" computer scientists who somehow transitioned from coding to running a multi-state crime syndicate. They bonded over radical veganism, militant animal rights, gender identity politics, and an intense, paranoid obsession with saving humanity from a "dark AI future." Apparently, their strategy for saving the world from Skynet involved leaving a trail of six dead bodies across the country.

The double homicide of Rita and Richard Zajko occurred on New Year's Eve in 2022 in their Chester Heights home. The prosecution's key evidence includes a neighbor's doorbell camera that captured a car pulling up, followed by a voice screaming "Mom!" and another yelling, "Oh my God! Oh, God, God!" Since then, Michelle has been in full-scale cope mode. In April 2025, she published an "Open Letter to the World" declaring, "I didn't murder my parents," and actually tried to argue in court filings that her dad killed her mom and then himself. Nice try, but the DA isn't buying the DIY murder-suicide theory.

The Zizian crime spree didn't stop in Pennsylvania. These eco-warrior coders have been linked to a wild series of violent disasters since 2022. It started with one of their own members getting clipped during an attack on a landlord in California, followed by the landlord getting flat-out murdered. Then came the grand finale in January 2025: a chaotic highway shootout in Vermont that left a US Border Patrol agent, David Maland, and another Zizian dead. Michelle Zajko is accused of personally supplying the gun used to take out the border agent, showing she was the group's resident arms dealer.

A few weeks after the Vermont shootout, Zajko, Daniel Blank, and their supreme leader Jack "Ziz" LaSota got bagged in Maryland. Their master plan apparently involved camping out in box trucks like modern-day digital nomads until a local landowner got annoyed and called the cops. Maryland state police hit them with trespassing, illegal gun, and drug charges. Because no cult story is complete without a sovereign-citizen style defense, LaSota’s lawyers are currently trying to get her off on a federal gun charge by claiming she’s incompetent, while simultaneously arguing they are absolutely not a cult and please don't call them Zizians.