An attorney for the person charged with killing a border patrol agent in northern Vermont says evidence disputes a version of events from federal authorities about what led to the traffic stop and deadly shootout.
Teresa Youngblut, 22, of Seattle, faces federal charges including murder in the fatal shooting of U.S. Border Patrol Agent David Maland. The shooting occurred during a traffic stop on Interstate 91 in Coventry in January 2025.
Prosecutors have filed notice that, if convicted, they will seek the death penalty for Youngblut.
Steven Barth, an attorney for Youngblut, wrote in a new filing last week in the case that evidence his client’s defense team has received so far from the prosecution appears to show that the traffic stop was conducted under a false pretense.
Information from the filing was first reported by Vermont Public.
Barth wrote in the filing that law enforcement had been surveilling Youngblut and Felix Bauckholt, also known as Ophelia, in northern Vermont for multiple days beginning on Jan. 14, 2025.
A worker at a hotel in Lyndonville had contacted law enforcement after a man and woman checked into the hotel and reported being concerned about the pair, “including that they appeared to be dressed in all-black tactical style clothing with protective equipment,” according to the charging documents.
At one point, Barth wrote in his filing, authorities tracked Youngblut, who was driving a vehicle, and Bauckholt, a passenger in that car, to a Walmart parking lot.
One federal agent had ordered a colleague — Maland — to make a “pretextual traffic stop” of the vehicle as soon as it left the parking lot, Barth wrote.
A pretextual traffic stop is where officers stop drivers for a minor violation because they suspect a more serious crime has occurred.
“Additional law enforcement documents, created after the fact, assert that the stop was due to immigration concerns,” Barth wrote. “By this point, however, law enforcement had already checked on the immigration status of Bauckholt (a German national) and determined that he was in the U.S. on a valid visa.”
More than 30 minutes after the stop, Barth wrote, “the decision was made to approach Youngblut and Bauckholt with force, remove them from the Prius, and detain them on suspicion of ‘alien smuggling,’ despite the already-established validity of Bauckholt’s visa. It was thereafter that shots were fired.”
Prosecutors alleged in charging documents that after the traffic stop on I-91, Youngblut exited the Toyota Prius that had been pulled over and opened fire, leading to a shootout with law enforcement.
Maland, 44, of Newport, was killed in the gunfire exchange, court documents stated, as was Bauckholt. Youngblut was shot and wounded.
Barth could not immediately be reached Thursday for comment. Fabienne Boisvert-DeFazio, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Vermont, in an email declined comment, adding the office “will be filing a response to the defense motion.”
Barth’s filing asks the judge to order the prosecutor to “secure, extract, and preserve full forensic copies of all cell phones or other devices” — work and personal — used by officers and agents in connection with the surveillance, stop and eventual shootout and its aftermath.
“The little information provided by the government to date,” Barth wrote, “also raises substantial concerns that prosecutors may have improperly delegated their duty to preserve relevant and likely favorable evidence to law enforcement agents, who — given Bauckholt’s death and the gunshot wounds sustained by Youngblut — may have a personal interest in ensuring that such evidence does not survive.”
The defense, Barth added, has received memos of FBI interviews of officers and agents involved in the incident.
“Defense investigation into the veracity and consistency of these accounts is ongoing, but there are reasons to question the accuracy and forthrightness of these law enforcement accounts,” Barth wrote.
The attorney noted that because both Bauckholt and Youngblut were shot by law enforcement, officers faced scrutiny regarding their own actions, with some of them retaining lawyers “immediately” after the incident.
Youngblut and Bauckholt had been linked by law enforcement to a loosely connected group known as the Zizians. The group’s members have been tied to six homicides across the country in recent years.
In one of those cases, Michelle Zajko, a former resident of Vermont, was charged last month in Pennsylvania with a slew of offenses, including two counts of first-degree murder in the fatal shooting of Zajko’s parents. The couple was killed in their Pennsylvania home on New Year’s Eve in 2022, according to police.
Zajko also faces federal charges in Vermont of making false statements during the purchase of firearms. Those firearms were later recovered from Youngblut and Bauckholt at the scene of the shootout in Coventry, charging documents stated.
The Zizians are an offshoot of the so-called Rationalist movement in the San Francisco Bay Area, and reportedly subscribe to beliefs centered on veganism, gender identity and preventing harmful effects from artificial intelligence.
Correction: An earlier version mischaracterized the federal charges that Michelle Zajko faces in Vermont.
