In court filings and arguments before a judge on Thursday, a federal prosecutor in Vermont laid out a web of connections between Teresa Youngblut, who faces charges related to the fatal shooting of a Border Patrol agent last week, and two people linked to murder investigations in other states.
The allegations of ties between Ms. Youngblut, 21, and people suspected of violent crimes in California and Pennsylvania shed little new light on the highway traffic stop in Coventry, Vt., on Jan. 20 that ended with the deaths of the border agent, David Maland, and Ms. Youngblut’s companion, Felix Bauckholt.
But during a detention hearing in federal court in Burlington, Vt., on Thursday, Matthew Lasher, an assistant U.S. attorney, cited those connections, and Ms. Youngblut’s “violent escalation of an otherwise peaceful law enforcement encounter,” as evidence that she should remain in federal custody while her case proceeds.
“That kind of unprovoked violence could not more clearly demonstrate the danger to the community that the defendant represents,” he said.
During the traffic stop last week, Border Patrol agents reported, Ms. Youngblut drew a handgun and fired it at them without warning. She has been charged with assaulting federal law enforcement officers with a deadly weapon.
Steven Barth, a federal public defender representing Ms. Youngblut, said that she was contesting her detention, but he declined to offer arguments supporting her release.
Ms. Youngblut appeared in court wearing an orange prison uniform and a medical mask, with her right arm in a sling. She did not speak and showed no emotion as Magistrate Judge Kevin J. Doyle ruled that she must be detained.
Seattle police records, first reported by The Seattle Times, suggested that there were sudden changes in Ms. Youngblut’s life last year that alarmed her parents, prompting them to contact the police last May. They told the police that their daughter had recently emptied her bedroom and moved out of their home, broken off old friendships, changed her phone number, and sent an email to her mother saying goodbye.
The behavior was “very unlike” her, the parents told the police, making them fearful that she was in “a controlling relationship.”
It remains unclear who killed Mr. Maland. Ms. Youngblut faces a maximum sentence of life in prison and a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years if convicted, according to the office of Michael P. Drescher, the acting U.S. attorney for the District of Vermont.
The case has created confusion and concern across rural northern Vermont, where the shooting took place on Interstate 91, a few miles south of the Canadian border. Law enforcement officials had been tracking the movements of Ms. Youngblut and Mr. Bauckholt for nearly a week before the incident, after an employee at a hotel in Lyndonville, Vt., where the pair had been staying, reported suspicions about their “tactical style” clothing and gear, according to an F.B.I. affidavit.
Searches of their Toyota Prius after the shooting turned up a stash of tactical equipment including a ballistic helmet; a pair of monocular night-vision goggles; a tactical belt with a holster; a magazine loaded with cartridges; two full-face respirators; and two hand-held, two-way radios, according to an affidavit. Investigators also recovered laptop computers and cellphones from the car.
According to a motion for detention that prosecutors filed, the firearms carried by Ms. Youngblut and Mr. Bauckholt on the day of the shooting had been purchased by a third person, “an individual purporting to be a resident of Orleans, Vt.,” from a dealer in central Vermont last February.
That individual is a “person of interest” in a dual homicide investigation in Delaware County, Pa., according to the motion.
Ms. Youngblut and the person who purchased the firearms are also connected to another individual who was detained during the Pennsylvania murder investigation, and again during a murder investigation in Vallejo, Calif., according to the motion.
News outlets, including The Associated Press and Open Vallejo, have identified the person detained in the two other murder investigations as Maximilian Snyder, 22, who was arrested last week in connection with the stabbing death on Jan. 17 of an 82-year-old man in Vallejo. The victim, a landlord in Vallejo, had been scheduled to testify in court against a group of tenants who had stabbed him with a sword during a dispute in 2022.
Mr. Snyder and Ms. Youngblut had applied for a marriage license in November, according to public records in King County, Wash.
Mr. Snyder had studied computer science at the University of Oxford, according to his LinkedIn profile, and in high school, he was named a 2019 National Merit Scholarship semifinalist at the Lakeside School in Seattle, a highly ranked private school that counts Microsoft’s founders, Paul Allen and Bill Gates, among its alumni. Ms. Youngblut also attended the school, according to The Seattle Times.
Mr. Bauckholt, who was killed when Ms. Youngblut exchanged gunfire with Border Patrol agents, was a German citizen and a former student at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, where he won medals in math competitions and received a scholarship for international graduate students with “outstanding promise” in quantum information science, according to online records.
An Instagram profile that appears to belong to Ms. Youngblut describes her as a computer science student and a member of the class of 2026 at the University of Washington. “Talk to me about being vegan and AI alignment,” the profile’s bio says.
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