Annie Elise

He enjoyed meeting new, interesting people, and some of his friends actually said that that kind of was a bad thing for him, because he was a super trusting guy in certain situations where maybe he shouldn't have been.

And sure enough, he got to know the Zizians after helping them with an anchor for their tugboat, and here's one of his friends explaining that.

So in 2022, Curtis was renting some land to a few tenants living in converted box trucks on one of his lots.

And by box trucks, I mean that basically they were like these souped up trailers, kind of like how van life is a big thing now.

They were doing with box trucks as well, just converting these trucks.

And two of those tenants were 21-year-old Suri Dow and 27-year-old Alexander Lethem, both of whom were connected to the Zizian community.

Alexander was more active online.

He posted in forums and he shared a lot of the group's more extreme, you know, logic over emotion type of ideas.

While Suri, on the other hand, was quieter publicly, but still very deeply involved in the group.

According to some neighbors, both of them seemed extremely smart, but apparently they had become very paranoid and very agitated, especially because Curtis was trying to evict them.

As it turns out, the Zizians who had been staying on Curtis's land hadn't paid rent in several months.

And there had also been some complaints about some strange behavior and extra people showing up and living there without permission.

But the eviction process was going extremely slow because there are a lot of different housing protections in place, especially here in California.

But then one morning, things took a very violent turn.

On November 13th, 2022, Curtis was asked to come by and check on a water leak in one of the Zizian trucks.

But when he got there, he was suddenly ambushed.

And what happened next is mostly based on two accounts, Curtis himself and a longtime friend, Patrick McMillan, who was also 80 years old at the time and lived nearby.

Now, Curtis said that when he stepped inside the trailer, he was immediately knocked unconscious.

Then, he was stabbed and beaten by multiple people.

He says that he totally blacked out and that when he came to, he was surrounded by this group of people who were all trying to kill him.