Who is Suri Dao, the ‘Zizian’ accused of a Vallejo murder?

Even in a circle of people who have made headlines for faked deaths and perplexing bursts of violence, Suri Dao is an enigma.

Dao, who is awaiting trial in a 2022 knife and sword attack on a Vallejo landlord, is one of roughly 10 known associates of a cultlike group of vegans and computer savants who some call the “Zizians” and have been linked to six violent deaths around the country.

Prosecutors say Dao and two others jumped the landlord, Curtis Lind, during an eviction standoff at a property where Zizians were renting space to live in souped-up box trucks. Lind allegedly fired a gun in self-defense, killing one of Dao’s friends and prompting prosecutors to charge Dao with murder, under the theory that Dao is responsible for the death.

But little is known about Dao, who is listed as age 23 in court documents. That’s partly because, even after more than two years in custody, Dao’s identity remains the subject of dispute.

Attorneys are at odds over whether “Suri Dao” was once Tessa Berns — a 24-year-old former National Merit Scholar from Denver who attended an art school, once excelled in the Colorado State Spelling Bee and spoke of fighting poverty and other global problems — and whether that matters.

Solano County prosecutors say Berns made up the new name on the spot when arrested by police. But defense attorney Brian Ford says he has known his client, who identifies as transgender and uses they/them pronouns, only as Suri Dao.

“Suri Dao is Suri Dao,” Ford told the Chronicle. “That’s their only identity as far as I’m concerned.”

The dispute is more than a legal matter. It offers a glimpse into the life of another highly intelligent young person who may have left behind a promising future to join a fringe group that is anchored in the Bay Area and is now tied to violence in three states.

If prosecutors are correct that Dao is Berns, their identity was obscured to the point that even their best friend from high school couldn’t find them — even after they were accused of murder and despite the more recent onslaught of media coverage of the Zizians.

Galen Metzger, who attended Denver School of the Arts with Berns, lost contact with Berns shortly after their graduation in 2019. Metzger said Berns came out in eighth grade as bigender, meaning Berns experienced two genders either simultaneously or distinctly, and changed their name to Elizah. At that time, Berns used she/her and he/him pronouns interchangeably.

In the spring of 2022, Metzger texted Berns and realized their phone number was disconnected. He knew that his friend was estranged from their parents, so he decided to search for Berns in a Discord server that Berns had frequented, where he heard rumors his friend had joined a cult. It was in that online chatroom that he came to suspect Berns was among the Zizians.

“I started asking around, and what I got was a lot of confusing things about this group called the Zizians,” Metzger said. “I thought that they were responsible for the disappearance of my friend.”

“My belief about cults is that there is a cult for everyone,” he said. “I just knew that this was the cult for Elizah.”

‘There are bodies’

Metzger said he tried to bring attention to the group by reaching out to journalists and the FBI. But he ultimately gave up. He didn’t realize his friend was apparently using the name Dao and facing a murder trial until the Chronicle reached him Thursday.

“It has taken that long for anybody institutionally to care,” Metzger said. “I’m happy that it’s happened now, but it’s too late. The damage is done.”

“There are bodies,” he said.

Metzger viewed a photo of Dao and said it appeared to be the person he knew as Berns. Two other former high school classmates reached by the Chronicle, who both asked to remain anonymous, identified the person depicted in the photo of Dao as Berns. Attempts to reach relatives of Berns were unsuccessful.

Deputy District Attorney Ilana Shapiro has repeatedly questioned Dao’s identity in court hearings, saying Dao’s adoptive mother has identified them as Tessa Berns.

Complicating matters, witnesses in the stabbing case told investigators the defendant had at the time of the incident gone by neither Dao nor Berns, but “Silver and Ivory.”

Whether or not they are the same person, both Berns and Dao appear to hold many of the traits associated with the Zizians, an eccentric and well-educated group of steadfast vegans who broke away from Berkeley’s rationalist community, which seeks to maximize human cognition and confront the risk of artificial intelligence destroying humanity.

The dissident group got its name from Jack Amadeus “Ziz” LaSota, a former aspiring tech worker and rationalist blogger who faked her own drowning in San Francisco Bay in August 2022 and is currently jailed along with two confederates in Maryland. LaSota has asserted, among other things, that established rationalist groups have gone astray and that trans women are blessed in rationalist thinking.

Chronicle interviews and a review of court records, news clippings and social media posts related to Berns reveal a gifted intellectual, an interest in applying logic and scientific concepts to do good, and an eventual departure from the public sphere. Berns’ most recent mailing address was a post office box in Berkeley.

Ford, Dao’s attorney, disputed that Dao was associated with the Zizians — or that such an organization existed. “I don’t know that a Zizian is a real thing,” he said. The attorney said Dao had witnessed the landlord, Lind, shooting their friend, Emma Borhanian, during the stabbing incident, and was devastated.

“Suri is very intelligent, they are very caring, soft-spoken, demure, they are small,” Ford said. “They have been through a lot.”

Knives, swords and guns

It was more than two years ago, in November 2022, when Dao and another Zizian, Alexander “Somni” Leatham, were accused of murder and attempted murder in the stabbing of Lind.

According to prosecutors, Dao lured Lind to check on a purported water leak before someone hit the landlord over the head and knocked him to the ground. Dao and Borhanian then allegedly stabbed Lind with knives while Leatham impaled him with a sword.

Lind drew his gun and opened fire, killing Borhanian and wounding Leatham, prosecutors said. Lind, who was then 80, lost his right eye but survived.

The stabbing was the first in a series of violent incidents authorities have linked to the fringe group. A month later, on New Year’s Eve of 2022, the parents of a Zizian associate, Michelle Zajko, were shot to death in their Pennsylvania home. While the double homicide remains unsolved, Zajko — who turned 30 the day of the killings — has been named a person of interest.

Then this January, Lind was stabbed to death at his Vallejo property, allegedly by a Zizian associate named Maximilian Snyder, who wanted to keep Lind from testifying at trial against Dao and Leatham. In a subsequent jailhouse interview with the Chronicle, Snyder dictated a letter explaining he was driven to end the human consumption of animals.

Three days after Lind’s killing, two associates of the group, Felix “Ophelia” Bauckholt and Teresa Youngblut, got into a shootout during a traffic stop near the Canadian border in Vermont, where they had apparently been looking to buy a rural property. After Border Patrol agent David Maland was fatally wounded, along with Bauckholt, investigators discovered that the Zizians’ guns had been bought by Zajko.

Yet the whereabouts of LaSota and Zajko were unknown until last Sunday, when authorities say they were arrested with a third person, Bay Area native and UC Berkeley graduate Daniel Blank, while trespassing on a remote property in northwest Maryland. All three wore black, while LaSota and Zajko were allegedly armed with guns and wore ammo belts.

Once again, they had been looking for a place to park and camp out in their box trucks.

After their jailing, Blank’s father — like Metzger — expressed concern to the Chronicle that his idealistic and cerebral loved one had been subject to cult brainwashing.

Saving the world

Many of those now linked to the Zizians were exceptional students, even prodigies, during their upbringing, attending competitive schools and earning awards and university scholarships, seemingly on their way to Silicon Valley rather than jail cells in three states.

Berns was no different, emerging from a childhood studded with accolades.

Adopted from China, Berns was raised in Denver, according to Metzger and court records. In 2011, Berns placed third in the 10-year-old girls category of a Denver-area kids’ triathlon, and in 2014 Berns won another bronze in the Colorado State Spelling Bee.

Metzger met Berns at Denver School of the Arts, a progressive public magnet school serving grades six to 12. His friend was a vegetarian who studied creative writing, wrote fantasy-genre fiction that was “very well done,” and got into Magic the Gathering, a tabletop game. Berns, he said, was “incredibly smart” and “obsessively drawn and compelled to ideas,” but was also bullied in school.

“She cared a lot about internal consistency and formal logical arguments,” Metzger said. “There are a lot of ways in which her beliefs cross traditional political lines and traditional social divides.”

Another former friend recalled that Berns, in high school, intensely sought answers about the world and their own identity. For a senior year creative writing project, Berns wrote of their admiration for Caitlyn Jenner, who had come out as a transgender woman when Berns was in the ninth grade.

“That summer I did my nails and wore a skirt and a pretty white blouse, and I pretended to be a man cross-dressing for the first time,” Berns wrote. “I knew, then, that I needed to become this: someone who was. Someone who was beautiful, even if no one else understood.”

The friend, who requested anonymity, said they reread these passages after being contacted by the Chronicle and felt they offered insight into why Berns may have found a group like the Zizians appealing.

“There can be kind of solace found in hearing someone say they know the answers,” this person said. “I think that could be appealing to anyone, and I understand how someone who’s been looking for answers for as long as Elizah could have related to that.”

As a high school senior in 2019, Berns was awarded a National Merit Scholarship and planned to study computer science and math at Arizona State University on a full scholarship, according to a Denver-area newsletter. Berns highlighted an interest in making a positive impact on the world.

“It turns out that math and computer science are really important for interventions in global poverty, artificial intelligence, and other areas,” Berns said in the newsletter.

Berns spoke of becoming an effective altruist, referring to a movement that seeks to maximize good works and charity by calculating the potential benefits — but has faced varied criticism in recent years. Rationalism and effective altruism have both flourished in Bay Area tech spaces and share some core beliefs, including fear of artificial intelligence.

Berns cited being inspired by the work of Kelsey Piper, a Stanford graduate who now writes from an effective altruist perspective for Vox’s “Future Perfect,” and by their fifth-grade reading of Elie Wiesel’s “Night,” which describes the author’s experiences in the Holocaust.

“I felt really upset because it felt like people should have done something more,” said Berns, referring to Jewish refugees who were denied entry to Cuba, Canada and the U.S. “I didn’t want to be the person who turned away the boat of refugees.”

The ‘sleep experiment’

The last time Berns texted Metzger was on Aug. 30, 2019. Berns had just started college in Arizona and was building a computer.

Later that year, Berns dabbled with Zizian ideology on the Discord server that Metzger would later use to search for his friend. Berns — who according to Metzger posted online under the moniker “Silver and Ivory” — shared a link to a blog where LaSota expounded upon her bizarre theories, such as that the two brain hemispheres could contain different personas and genders that were often in conflict.

Berns appeared to reject those ideas.

“Ziz’s hemisphere theory sounds false to me,” Berns wrote in November 2019.

Berns later called LaSota’s hemispheres theory “pseudoscientific,” but expressed an interest in trying “unihemispheric sleep,” a technique that one of LaSota’s close associates, Gwen Danielson, had devised to quiet one brain hemisphere. The practice apparently involved sleep deprivation.

“I’m interested in what will happen if I try the sleep experiment on myself without Gwen or Ziz’s direct involvement,” Berns wrote on their blog on May 1, 2020. That same month, Berns posted that they were moving forward with the test — and solicited participants for “an hourlong psychology experiment involving mild discomfort and potentially intimate disclosures.”

Metzger now believes that the bullying Berns experienced in high school may have led his friend to find company among like-minded people, such as the Zizians.

“She could have done great things. That’s the worst part about this goddamn cult,” Metzger said. “It targets the best and brightest of us.”

Berns’ blog went silent in May 2021.

What’s in a name?

Since Dao’s arrest in November 2022, prosecutors have focused on proving the defendant attacked Lind. But they have also spent time seeking to prove Dao is Tessa Berns.

Police found no evidence that someone named Suri Dao had been on Lind’s property before he was stabbed, but did find “a lot of indicia in the name ‘Tessa Berns,’” Shapiro said at one court hearing. Investigators reported finding a Nevada driver’s license for Tessa Berns after Lind’s stabbing, though they did not specify where.

Shapiro said police body-camera footage showed that Dao made up the name on the spot as they sat next to LaSota in a police car. Prosecutors later alleged Dao tried to escape from jail after discussing it in a phone call with LaSota.

Investigators additionally deduced through jail calls that the defendant was adopted from China, and that their adopted mother’s name is Ann — details that match those of Berns.

When asked to identify the person in Dao’s Solano County mug shot, though, prosecutors said Ann Berns asked for contact information for the defense attorney and ceased communications with the prosecution team.

During a December 2023 hearing, Shapiro asked a judge to order Dao to acknowledge in court that their true name was Tessa Berns and that they were born on Nov. 26, 2000. “The People obviously have a right to know the true identity of a defendant,” the prosecutor declared.

If Dao managed to successfully break out or was granted bail, Shapiro said, the court “might potentially never see defendant Dao again.” Ford responded that the name concerns were “much ado about nothing.”

“I don’t really know how important it is to have a quote, unquote true name,” Ford argued. “My client is transgender and perhaps has a different name than their birth name, but it is their name.”

Even if Tessa Berns was his client’s legal name, the prosecution found no previous criminal record or failures to appear under that name, Ford noted. “The only thing that is related to that person,” he said, “is that they won spelling bee competitions, which should be a point in our favor frankly.”

Judge Tim Kam denied the prosecution’s request, citing a state law that requires defendants, upon arraignment, to be informed that they may correct the record only if they are being prosecuted under the wrong name. Otherwise, the law states, they are “proceeded against by the name in the accusatory pleading.” The judge did note that Dao had to provide a thumbprint — though there were apparently no matches in government databases.

During more than two years in custody, Dao’s mental health has seemed to deteriorate. At one point, a judge suspended the proceedings while doctors determined whether they were able to participate in their own defense.

Jail officials have at times resorted to force-feeding Dao, while a nurse sat outside their cell 24 hours a day, on suicide watch. Attorneys reported Dao’s self-harm, including biting their wrists and suffering from delusional thoughts that led them to stick objects in their eyes.

At a hearing Wednesday in Vallejo, Dao appeared via Zoom. Wearing a blue shirt, they sat quietly, at one point prompting a prison guard to ask the judge if they could leave.

Dao and Leatham’s trial is scheduled for April. 

Presuming Dao is Berns, Metzger wishes his friend had not ended up in such straits, but reasons that things could be worse.

“It’s better than learning she’s dead,” he said. “I’m glad she’s alive.”