Michelle Zajko

Michelle Zajko is a member of the Zizian group whose parents, Richard Zajko (72) and Rita Zajko (69), were found shot to death in their home in Chester Heights, Pennsylvania, on the night of December 31, 2022. She was questioned and named a person of interest in their deaths but was not charged in the killings, and she has publicly denied involvement. Federal prosecutors separately charged her over the firearms tied to the January 2025 Zizian killing of a Border Patrol agent in Vermont.¹²

The Firearms Charge

Federal authorities in Vermont charged Zajko, a former resident of Coventry, with making false statements to buy firearms. Investigators alleged that in February 2024 she provided a false address to purchase three firearms from a Vermont gun store, and that one of those weapons was used in the January 20, 2025 shootout on Interstate 91 in which Agent David Maland and the group member Felix Bauckholt were killed. Authorities have said Zajko provided the gun used in the Vermont shooting.²³

Investigators also drew a forensic line back to her parents' deaths. Rita Zajko had been shot in the back of the head and Richard Zajko in the temple by a round that first passed through his hand, with two 9mm shell casings left at the scene and no weapon recovered; a neighbor's doorbell camera captured audio of a voice shouting "Mom!" Pennsylvania authorities determined that the bullet recovered from Richard Zajko's body matched ammunition Michelle Zajko had purchased in Vermont, and she acknowledged owning a 9mm semiautomatic handgun. Prosecutors in the Vermont border case said she had been in frequent contact with Teresa Youngblut in the period around the shooting.⁴⁶

Arrest and the Open Letter

On February 16, 2025, Zajko was arrested in Allegany County, Maryland, alongside Jack LaSota and Daniel Blank after a property owner near Frostburg reported that the three were living in two white box trucks on his land and refused to leave; they were charged with trespassing, obstructing law enforcement, and illegal firearm possession, and all three were ordered held without bail on February 18. The arrest delivered LaSota, a fugitive who had staged her own death in 2022, into custody alongside Zajko in a single stop.⁴⁷

Through her attorney she released a twenty-page handwritten "Open Letter to the World," provided to the Associated Press, in which she wrote, "You, the public, are being lied to," and denied killing her parents, stating that "the truth about my friends and I will make a lot more sense than what you've been reading about in the papers." She remained a person of interest in the Pennsylvania killings without being charged in them, while the federal firearms case proceeded separately in Vermont. By early 2026 she was among at least seven people associated with the group facing charges across California, Pennsylvania, and Vermont.⁵⁸