By Guy Page
Three young people with prestigious, accomplished academic backgrounds are suspected in at least two brutal, connected killings.
Maximilian Snyder, 22, and Teresa Youngblut, 21, sought a marriage license in Washington State in November. They have each been charged by authorities in separate January killings that claimed the lives of a Border Patrol agent in Vermont and an 82-year-old landlord in Vallejo, according to police and court records obtained by Open Vallejo, a California news outlet.
Maximilian Snyder, a 22-year-old data scientist arrested in Northern California on Friday on suspicion of murder, and Teresa Youngblut, the 21-year-old computer science student charged last week in connection with the shooting death of U.S. Border Patrol Agent David Maland, appear to follow a fringe, self-described “vegan Sith” ideology that started in the Bay Area and has connections to violence, according to police records, an interview with a person familiar with the group, and years of social media and blog posts reviewed by Open Vallejo.
Both Snyder and Youngblut attended a prestigious day school in Seattle and studied computer science. Snyder was an award-winning computer student who later studied at Oxford University in England.
Snyder and Youngblut share their background in both computer science and a strong academic-oriented upbringing with Felix Bauckholt, the German national who was shot and killed in the Coventry, Vermont encounter in which Maland died. Bauckholt was an award-winning math/computer science student in high school and (in Canada) in college, and had a career as a ‘quantitative trader’ in New York City until he left his job there last year. He is the son of accomplished avant-garde music composer Carola Bauckholt, winner of numerous awards and a former visiting faculty member at Harvard University.
A motion filed Monday by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Vermont alleges that Youngblut had been in frequent contact with “a person of interest in a homicide investigation in Vallejo, California.” The Vallejo homicide suspect was also previously detained but not charged in connection with a double homicide in Pennsylvania, according to federal prosecutors, who did not elaborate.
In 2022, landlord Curtis Lind was allegedly impaled with a sword and blinded in one eye during an attack by several young people who lived in box trucks on his Vallejo property and had stopped paying Lind during the pandemic-era rent moratorium. Court records obtained by Open Vallejo show that Lind was set to testify against his alleged assailants as the sole eyewitness in a criminal trial scheduled for April.
