On the night that he was impaled with a sword and attacked, Vallejo resident and landlord Curtis Lind urged his friend to call the police. A group of squatters were on his property, approaching his mobile home, banging on the door and attempting to make entry.
“He asked me to call the police,” Patrick McMillan testified Tuesday in Solano County Superior Court. “He said they were screaming threats to kill him.”
McMillan called 911 around 1:45 a.m. on Nov. 13, 2022, and dispatchers promised to send police. When none arrived, he called again. No officers arrived. Hours passed and McMillan, 81, said he fell asleep. He was awakened around 7 a.m. when Lind came to his door banging on it and screaming for help.
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“They’re killing me! There’s knives sticking out of me!” McMillan recalled Lind screaming.
Opening the door to his trailer, he spotted Lind sitting on the sideboard of a nearby truck with a sword suck through his upper left chest, and a gaping wound near his right eye.
“He was bleeding like a stuck pig,” McMillan said. “I mean, it was just gushing out of him.”
His eyewitness account was recorded on video in the Fairfield courtroom of Judge John B. Ellis as part of conditional testimony to preserve it for potential future use at trial of two people charged in connection with the attack.
Prosecutors allege Suri Dao, 24, and Alexander Jeffrey Leatham, 29, attempted to kill Lind, who managed to shoot two of his attackers that day, at his Third Street property, wounding one and killing 31-year-old Emma Borhanian. Lind was ruled to have acted in self-defense. Dao and Leatham are charged with felony murder for Borhanian’s death, the attempted murder of Lind, and aggravated mayhem while using a knife, or sword, to attack and injure Lind. The charges are coupled with several enhancements, including great bodily injury on a victim 70 years or older, and inflicting great bodily injury or using a firearm.
In California, conditional testimony like Tuesday’s refers to the process of recording testimony of a witness before trial when there’s a reasonable belief that the witness may be unavailable to testify at trial. This is typically done when a witness is sick or disabled, or is elderly or a dependent adult.
McMillan testified he has suffered several strokes and heart attacks. He was accompanied in court by his in-home care nurse and listened to questions with the help of courtroom hearing devices, with testimony interrupted several times while the equipment intermittently failed.
The recorded testimony can be used in court if McMillan is truly unavailable whenever the trial occurs.
San Francisco-based criminal defense attorney Brian Ford represents Dao, and Alternate Public Defender Carol Long represents Leatham. Dao, a state prison inmate, appeared via a remote video link during the proceedings. Leatham, a transgender woman, was held in an isolation booth with a window after making an outburst, yelling about her treatment in jail, as Sheriff’s deputies attempted to bring her into the courtroom. She has had similar outbursts at previous court sessions.
Deputy District Attorney Ilana Shapiro, who leads the prosecution, questioned McMillan extensively about life on the property Lind owned that was filled with storage crates, a few box trucks and some trailers where he allowed a few tenants like him to live. Dao, Leatham and a group of others moved on to the property a few years before the November 2022 attack, McMillan said.
“At first it was just one, Gwen, and a few months later more moved on,” he said, noting that they lived in trucks and a shuttle bus. He testified that he’d seen Gwen before, on a visit to a boat Lind owned in Half Moon Bay when she and three others visited.
Once the group was on the land, McMillan said he mostly stayed in his home and avoided them, saying he would see different members “walking around naked” on the property.
And he said he met one who called herself “Ziz,” when he went out to help her hook up water equipment.
“Ziz” — aka Jack Amadeus LaSota — is the apparent leader of a group calling themselves the “Zizians,” the Associated Press has reported. AP interviews and a review of court records and online postings tell the story of how a group of young, highly intelligent computer scientists, most of them in their 20s and 30s, met online, shared anarchist beliefs, and became increasingly violent. Their goals aren’t clear, but online writings span topics from radical veganism to gender identity to artificial intelligence.
The Zizians are linked to six deaths across the United States, including the killing of a U.S. Border Patrol agent, the Associated Press has reported.
McMillan testified Tuesday that Lind confided in him that he was going to evict the group for nonpayment of rent, and McMillan said he saw eviction notices Lind attached to the Zizian group’s truck windshields, adding that there were multiple notices from the courts inside the mail box everyone on the property shared.
And he said Lind told him about a run-in with the group before the sword stabbing incident.
“He said they had been throwing rocks on the roof of his trailer,” McMillan said, adding that he climbed up a nearby ladder and saw the rocks. A week before the stabbing, Lind told him the group had met him on some stairs leading to his mobile home, which was perched atop a pair of shipping containers on the property. One of the group had a knife and was stroking it, he said, adding that Lind told him he had asked the group, “Is that the knife you’re going to hurt me with?”
McMillan said he advised his friend to start carrying a gun. Shapiro asked McMillan why he had given Lind that advice and McMillan replied, “Because you don’t bring a knife to a gun fight.”
Two days later, the sword attack on Lind occurred.
Asked to identify Zizian group members living on the property via a series of photographs, McMillan was able to point out three: “Ziz,” “Gwen,” and “Emma,” saying he didn’t have last names.
Two days after the impalement of Lind, Leatham and Dao were charged.
The case took a turn in January when prosecutors say fellow Zizian Maximilian Bentley Snyder, 23, of Washington state, killed Lind, 82, on Jan. 17 at his property in Vallejo. He was set to testify in the pending trial for Dao and Leatham.
Following Tuesday’s recorded testimony, Judge Ellis ordered attorneys to return to court at 1:30 p.m. on May 2 in Department 22 in Fairfield when he will consider a number of motions filed by defense attorneys in the case.