Previous: The Incomprehensible Club
New News, everyone: we… have been relaxing at the beach 🐬 We swore not to bring our laptop, then gnawed our fingers to the bone bc we could not post abt the REAL new news: that Patrick McMillan, on 4/22/25, took the stand for some pre-trial testimony.
Patrick is the best friend of Curtis Lind. He is the key witness to the Vallejo shooting/stabbing, now that Mr. Lind is no longer w/ us.
As soon as we returned home to [Redacted], we ran straight to the News on News studio for a Q & A on what this New News (NN) revealed. You can find that Q & A here.
We’re a few days late, for sure; but this NN is bananas, & we have many thoughts on it. There’s a lot of stuff to get thru, so we’ve divided this segment into:
1. 4 highly surprising Patrick statements (PS)
2. Our thoughts, based on these PS, on a q. we know a lot of you have: whether Jamie is @aflowerbynoothername
3. A Somni statement
4. Last thoughts on how this NN has been covered by the press
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4 Highly Surprising Patrick Statements
#1: Patrick says he doesn’t recognize either Somni or Suri as having ever been on Lind’s property.
But, according to Patrick, there’s a reason for this: "I've had eight strokes…. After my last stroke I lost most of my memory, not all of it.”
😐😐😐😐😐 Indeed. Patrick says:
• He doesn’t know where his kids are.
• He doesn’t know how long he lived on Lind’s land.
• He can’t remember things he’s said previously in court.
• He can only remember 3 names from this friend group: Emma, Gwen, & Ziz.
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So… this is v. sad. This is an old man w/ apparently serious health problems. In addition to his eight strokes, he’s had nine heart attacks & has cancer! We have no desire to doubt this man’s illnesses.
Did these strokes happen recently? No, they didn’t. His last stroke (LS) was before the Lind attack. He says that, since this LS, he still has the ability to form new memories. Yet he also says that his health problems are responsible for the fact that he frequently contradicts himself, & frequently “struggl[es] to remember details”.
He says this is bc he can’t remember the things he's previously testified abt.
The one thing Patrick has no trouble remembering is his version of the Vallejo attack. He ofc says this is bc it happened after his last stroke. If so, why does he struggle to keep the rest of his story straight? 🤷🏻♀️ We are no neurologist! We are no Oliver Sacks. We have no clue what goes on in the wild, wacky world of the brain— nor does anyone else at present.
Patrick did not, btw, witness the fight. He only witnessed Lind appearing at his trailer, covered in wounds, saying, “They’re killing me!”
He claims he can also remember the girls “behav[ing] in ways Lind found threatening” before the attack. Even tho, again, he was surprised to hear that Somni & Suri lived on the property at all.
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As you can imagine, Somni’s & Suri’s lawyers had some q.s. They asked Patrick:
You said you could no longer climb ladders, yet also say that you “had climbed a ladder to see evidence that the group was harassing Lind.”
They also asked if he noticed that his answers had shifted depending on whether he was answering the prosecution or the defense. The judge vetoed this q. as “argumentative”, which boggles our mind: it seems like an excellent q. to ask!
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Surprising thing #2: what exactly, to Patrick, are Cult Criteria? Bc he loooves to call these gals & their pals (TGATP) “the cult people”!
According to Patrick, there are 3 reasons why he calls TGATP a “cult”:
1. bc they were all transgender
2. bc they were “all together”
3. & bc they all seemed to speak through one tenant: Gwen Danielson.
😑😑😑…Gwen was never an official tenant! Gwen was presumed DEAD at this time. We’ve heard rumors she’d occasionally come to stay w/ Somni & Emma, but… THEY were the tenants.
Patrick may, btw, be remembering an earlier time… like 2021, when Gwen was ~officially alive~. Then it would have made sense for the others to “speak thru Gwen”. She was the one who’d arranged their lease.
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#3: Patrick sort of validated the wonkiest claim we’ve heard abt him: that he’s ex-CIA. He…. sorta validated this.
He said that, from 1975-2005, he’d worked ~pro bono~ as a “contractor” for “the U.S. intelligence community”. Someone in court asked for proof, & he said that he could give none: “Could get me in serious trouble”! 🤷🏻♀️
What are we supposed to do w/ this? Are courts allowed to ask the gov’t for records, or can anyone claim they’re a pro bono spook?
The defense had some q.s abt this too. Specifically, they had q.s abt a few of Patrick’s criminal convictions, which Patrick said were needed for him to “build up his undercover identity”.
Patrick kept mum on this— to the extent that the judge objected: “you said some stuff about it last time you testified”!
"I don't know what I was thinking," answered Patrick.
All he said was that his job only paid “expenses”, & that he’d mostly worked “from home”. Why would a WFH spook need to “build up his undercover identity”? Who knows!
Finally, Suri’s lawyer mused that Patrick’s spookery may indicate he’s “good at lying.” Patrick said he “never lied”. Instead, “They” (who? Nobody knows) would ask a q., & he would simply ask a q. back.
If this is so, we ask again: why the need for such a hard-won undercover identity (UI)? Isn’t the whole point of a UI to be able to lie convincingly? We have no clue.
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Surprising thing #4: recordings were played from 911 calls made by Patrick at ~2am on the morning of Emma’s murder (~5.5 hours before her murder.)
The Independent reports that, in these calls, Patrick says that ppl were banging on the side of Lind’s trailer: specifically, that “Lind was being attacked and threatened” by this banging. He claims the police came, but did nothing.
Why is this surprising? Bc it contradicts previous testimony given by Patrick & Lind, where both said that, at ~1am on the morning of the murder, the girls were throwing rocks at Lind’s trailer & trying to open his door.
While ofc the girls could have thrown rocks & tugged on the door & banged on the sides… why would Patrick, in a 911 call, only report the last of these 3 things? We think the 2nd is the scariest, & we’d try to whisper all 3 out to the dispatcher. We dk.
This also contradicts @aflowebynoothername’s report that they received a log of calls made to police in Lind’s area on the night of the murder… & that the log showed 0 calls being made. 2am of the day of the murder is presumably considered “the night of the murder”.
This does not, however, contradict anything Jamie has said abt Patrick.
As a reminder, Jamie has said:
“I expect Lind & McMillan had a profit motive. Lind was $50,000 in debt to the electric company PG&E (iirc), and could not find a buyer for the lot.”
“Patrick McMillan… I believe coached Lind on what to say on false calls to emergency services. Lind describes events on those calls that at least one witness says never happened. And Lind is recorded as calling McMillan right before calling 911 in the days before the shooting.”
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Our thoughts on a q. we know many of you have: is Jamie @aflowerbynoothername?
The q. of whether Jamie = @AFBNON is pretty important, we think.
If Jamie ≠ @AFBNON, it seems v. impressive to us that they align on their big points (BP). They align on their BP that Lind was the attacker, & that Patrick is lying.
If Jamie = @AFBNON, this is somewhat less impressive.
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Patrick’s recorded 911 call is potentially a sign that they aren’t.
@AFBNON & Jamie handle this q. of the call v. differently: @AFBNON denies it happened, while Jamie does not mention it at all, nor do they mention @AFBNON’s empty call logs.
Ofc, there’s another explanation for these differing details (TDD): TDD could reflect the fact that Jamie is writing from jail, w/out their @AFBNON notes on them. TDD could mean nothing.
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Our only other comment on this q. is: if @AFBNON’s account is true, it contains details that we think can only have come from Ziz.
Here are the most important:
Somni isn’t breathing. Ziz performs CPR on her; Somni comes to & says that she can’t feel her legs. Somni will “stop breathing multiple times that morning”. @AFBNON says that they “think [they] heard that her heart stopped at least once.”
Ziz then turns to Emma— who she’d assumed had gotten shot in the head (due to the bits of lung in Emma’s hair.) Finding no head wound, she again attempts CPR, to no avail. At one pt., she thinks she can hear Emma’s heart beating, but this is just the blood rushing in her own ears. She will crack Emma’s ribcage she is trying so hard.
Ziz will later say that, in the hospital, she cannot get the taste of Emma’s blood out of her mouth. She keeps coughing; she thinks that some of the blood has gotten into her lungs.
In @AFBNON’s own words: “Emma was [Ziz’s] home. She said she will never be ok again.”
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These seemingly Ziz-reliant details (TSZD) keep Jamie an @AFBNON contender: they were talking to Ziz by the time @AFBNON’s account was published. But they’re not the only contender— we dk who else Ziz was talking to.
If @AFBNON’s account is untrue, ofc, TSZD are explained bc they were invented wholesale. 🤷🏻♀️
We go more in-depth on this Jamie/@AFBNON riddle in our Q & A, which you can find here.
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A Somni Statement
"The police have repeatedly sexually assaulted me. My naked breasts are not for the police to touch.”
This is in reference to the civil rights lawsuit against Solano County which she has filed. We mentioned it here; but, just ftr, the Independent describes the lawsuit this way:
in [it] she alleged that prison officers had "over and over again" pinned her to the floor, cut her clothes off and touched her breasts in what they called "forcible cross-gender strip searches" as well as subjecting her to other humiliating treatment.
Here is a scan from her lawsuit, sent in by a sleuthy reader:
Somni also repeated a v. important part of her previous statement:
“Officer Larry Duffield said I deserved to be shot for being transgender while he had a gun and I was in chains."
In response to both of these statements, she was quickly hustled out of the courtroom & into “the isolation room” by guards.
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Last Thoughts on How All This Has Been Covered
😮💨 Did anything else abt this New News catch our attention? Yes— the Independent, in its report on the hearing, threw out this line:
Circumstances, evidence of the cult's path of destruction, and an absence of other suspects may still make the case against Leatham and Dao easy to win for Solano County prosecutors.
This is deeply distressing. To us, the first 2 parts of this statement read as: bc everyone’s already been convinced by the media that this is a violent cult, Somni & Suri might still lose their cases, even tho Patrick is such a bad witness.
This is partly distressing bc here, in this v. article, is how the Independent describes the “cult”:
[They appear] to be devoted to a radical form of Rationalism, as espoused by LaSota, which includes devout veganism, and spurious ideas about the hemispheres of the brain and morality itself.
We will respond to these rapid-fire. If you are new to this site, & want more details, look elsewhere.
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We don’t agree that Ziz “espouses” a “radical form of Rationalism”; we do not see this on her blog.
We dk what “devout veganism” would be. Is it like “approaching veganism w/ religious fervor”?
We’re not gonna pretend that we *go for* Gwen’s hemisphere theory; but in our opinion, the worst part abt it is that it’s overplayed by the media.
We, unlike they, don’t feel it’s super central to Ziz’s blog. This is why we’ve barely mentioned it. We think it’s an easy, kooky-sounding thing the media can point to over & over as proof of “cultish ideology”, & we’re tired of it.
Ftr, we think that Gwen’s hemisphere theory sounds a little like Internal Family Systems? It doesn’t use the same words, but that’s bc neither she nor Ziz typically borrow words from either psychology or philosophy— even when their ideas dovetail w/ both. Again, they’re not psych girls. They’re not humanities girls. They’re STEM girls.
Finally, it’s incorrect & weird to claim Ziz espoused “spurious ideas” abt “morality itself”. What is a spurious idea abt morality? We can imagine a few, but we’ve never heard sthng called “morally spurious” before— ever.
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Then there’s the 3rd part of the Independent’s statement: “an absence of other suspects” may make Somni’s & Suri’s cases hard to win anyway.
Ofc, the other suspect IS LIND.
But, in the immortal words of J. Oliver Conroy, “The authorities [do] not agree” w/ this.
No media outlet, so far as we know, has even presented it as a possibility. They have never presented a full description of this alternate storyline; tho they have, repeatedly, noted they’re aware of its existence.
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That’s all for tn’s New News! There’s another pre-trial hearing on 5/2/25. Keep Somni & Suri in yr thoughts 🙏 XX- Drosselmeyer
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