A Washington state woman was ordered held without bail Thursday in connection with the death of a U.S. Border Patrol agent in a case that has grown to encompass killings in multiple states.
Teresa Youngblut, 21, faces federal firearms charges in the Jan. 20 death of Agent David Maland. She’s accused of opening fire on agents during a traffic stop in northern Vermont, sparking a shootout that also left her companion, Felix Bauckholt, dead.
Pennsylvania state police said Wednesday that the gun used in the Vermont shooting was purchased by a person of interest in the Dec. 31, 2022, killings of Richard and Rita Zajko, who were shot to death in their Chester Heights home. Both Youngblut and the buyer were in frequent contact with someone who was detained as part of the Pennsylvania investigation and is a person of interest in another killing in California, U.S. Attorney Michael Drescher said in a court filing.
Prosecutors didn’t elaborate during a brief hearing Thursday during which neither Youngblut nor her attorney spoke, according to NBC5-TV. Youngblut’s attorney has not responded to requests for comment on the charges. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for Feb. 7.
In the meantime, police and court records have shed some light on the connections.
Jack LaSota is currently facing charges of obstructing law enforcement and disorderly conduct in Pennsylvania. Authorities won’t say whether those charges are related to the Zajko deaths, but court records show that police were searching for a gun used in two killings when they arrested LaSota 12 days later at a hotel about 10 miles (16 kilometers) from the scene of the killings.
LaSota also has connections to some of the key players in the California case.
In 2019, LaSota and three others were arrested while protesting an event hosted by the Center for Applied Rationality at a camping retreat in Occidental, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. In 2022, two of the others, Emma Borhanian and Alexander Jeffrey Leatham, were accused of attacking their landlord with a sword in Vallejo. The landlord, Curtis Lind, survived the November 2022 attack but was stabbed to death Jan. 17.
Maximilian Snyder was charged this week with that killing. In November, someone with the same name applied for a marriage license with a Teresa Youngblut in Kirkland, Washington. Snyder’s attorney declined to comment on the charges.
LaSota may have been present during the 2022 landlord attack, according to court documents that also suggest LaSota had been falsely reported dead three months earlier.
On Aug. 19, 2022, the U.S. Coast Guard responded to a report that LaSota had fallen out of a boat in San Francisco Bay and conducted a search but didn’t find a body, according to documents included in a civil rights lawsuit LaSota and others had filed after their 2019 arrest. An obituary was published, and LaSota’s mother confirmed the death to LaSota’s criminal defense attorney. But months later, a prosecutor emailed the attorney and said LaSota was contacted by police in Vallejo and was “alive and well” at the site of a crime on or about Nov. 13, the date Lind was attacked.
Jerold Friedman, who represented LaSota in the civil case, said Thursday that he verified the Coast Guard report at the time and that he doesn’t recall the last time he was in contact with LaSota. The attorney who represented LaSota in the 2019 criminal case did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment. A phone message was left at the office of the lawyer listed as representing him in the current Pennsylvania case.
Though authorities have not publicly identified the person who bought the gun used in Vermont, the VTDigger news site reported that federal authorities issued an alert to firearms dealers seeking information about purchases made by Michelle Jacqueline Zajko and describing her as a person of interest in the Vermont shooting.
According to a public records database, a Michelle Zajko was registered to vote in 2016 at the same home address in Pennsylvania as Richard and Rita Zajko. In 2021, a Michelle Zajko bought a half-acre piece of property in Derby, Vermont, a few miles (about 6 kilometers) from the Canadian border. According to town records, the land is undeveloped.
