Transgender vegan cult member accuses guards of de-transitioning her in court

A suspected member of the radical “Zizian” cult was forcibly removed from a California courtroom after claiming an officer said she should be killed for being transgender.

Alexander “Somni” Leatham, a 29-year-old trans woman from Agoura Hills, California, was one of five alleged members of the group of radical vegans, many of whom identified as trans, who were in Solano Superior Court Tuesday. 

Leatham alleged that an officer told her she “deserved to be shot for being transgender while he had a gun, and I was in chains,” according to SFGate. Leatham, and others in the group, face charges in connection with a string of killings across the country that culminated in the January killing of a U.S. Border Patrol agent along the northern border. 

Read more of Fox News Digital coverage on the Zizians here.

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The 29-year-old reportedly went on a profanity-laden rant in the courtroom Tuesday, accusing authorities of attempting to de-transition her.

“The court has been hormonally detransitioning me for quarter of a decade as part of a state-sponsored conversion therapy program,” she said, according to SFGate. “I am not suicidal. I have never been suicidal.”

“If I am killed in police custody, it was murder!” Leatham said.

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Judge John B. Ellis ordered Leatham to be taken to an isolation room prior to the hearing, saying that she could appear via camera due to her behavior, SFGate reported.

“If defendant Leatham can’t behave herself, she can be moved to the isolation booth,” Ellis said.  

Members of the Zizians have been charged or named as persons of interest in connection with six deaths across the country, including the stabbing of an 82-year-old landlord in January, the shooting of a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Vermont in January and the 2022 double homicide of an elderly Pennsylvania couple. 

Leatham and Suri Dao face attempted murder charges after a rent dispute with landlord Curtis Lind that ended with Zizian follower Emma Borhanian being fatally shot by Lind in self-defense. Lind was injured by a samurai sword during the altercation.

Lind had bought the property, placing 20-foot trailers and shipping containers on the land so he could rent them to people who were unable to afford the cost of housing in Vallejo, Patrick McMillan, a tenant who lives in a mobile home on the property, told the San Francisco Chronicle. Lind also lived on the property.

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The group lived in a cluster of trailer trucks, McMillan told the Chronicle. Initially, they paid rent but stopped paying during the pandemic.

“He had an agreement that they were going to fix up their vehicles, and then they were going to leave,” Lind’s daughter, Dina Morrill, told the newspaper.

“The truth is, they jumped him,” Lind’s son, Carl Lind, told KTVU.

Lind managed to shoot two of his alleged attackers, killing one of them, Borhanian. Prosecutors concluded that the landlord acted in self-defense. 

“After they attacked him, he got his gun out and shot two of them, killed one of them,” McMillan told the Chronicle. “The other one had three shots to the chest.”

The landlord was left seriously injured after the group attacked him with a samurai sword. McMillan told KTVU that he had the sword “stuck through his back with about a foot of it sticking out in front.”

Lind survived the initial attack but was then stabbed to death in a second attack on Jan. 17, 2025. Maximilian Snyder, 22, another “Ziz” member, was arrested and charged with his murder, according to court records obtained by FOX 13 Seattle.

The next hearing is set for April 22 at 9 a.m. Fox News Digital reached out to Leatham’s attorney.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.