Murder of Blaze Bernstein

On January 2, 2018, 19-year-old University of Pennsylvania sophomore Blaze Bernstein was killed after leaving home to meet an acquaintance at a park in California. Authorities later charged his former high school classmate Samuel Woodward with the murder, declaring that the incident was a hate crime.

Details
On January 10, 2018, 19-year-old University of Pennsylvania sophomore Blaze Bernstein was found dead in a park in Orange County, California, eight days after having been reported missing. He was visiting his family in Lake Forest, California, when he was killed. He had been stabbed 28 times. Two days later, Samuel Woodward, one of Bernstein's former high school classmates and a member of neo-Nazi terrorist group Atomwaffen Division, was arrested and charged with murdering Bernstein. As Bernstein was both openly gay and Jewish, authorities declared that Bernstein was a victim of a hate crime. Five deaths had links to the Atomwaffen Division over eight months from 2017 to early 2018.

Blaze Bernstein
Bernstein was born on April 27, 1998, in South Orange County, California, to Gideon Bernstein, an equity partner at Leisure Capital Management, and Jeanne Pepper, a former lawyer who retired from law in 2000 to raise their three children. After completing high school at Orange County School of the Arts, Blaze attended the University of Pennsylvania.

Samuel Woodward
The 20-year-old accused, Samuel Lincoln Woodward, was born in Newport Beach, California and grew up in a conservative household alongside his older brother. Woodward officially became a student at the Orange County School of the Arts, but his father kicked him out during his junior year due to multiple reports of Woodward becoming a misandrist to gay men. Woodward finished his junior and senior years at Corona Del Mar High School before briefly attending the California State University Channel Islands for its first two semesters. Dorm mates at Channel Islands told the Orange County Register that Woodward was not sociable with them.

Legal proceedings
The presiding judge initially charged Woodward with murder and personal use of a deadly weapon. In August 2018, two charges of committing a hate crime were added because of Bernstein's sexual orientation. Woodward, who has been linked to the murder scene by DNA evidence, pleaded not guilty. A pretrial hearing was held in January 2019.

Woodward's attorney stated that Woodward has Asperger syndrome, autism, and an obsessive-compulsive disorder which likely contributed to both his social issues and other issues regarding his own sexual identity.

Woodward, who was 20 at the time of the crime, faces a sentence of life without parole if found guilty. He had initially faced a maximum sentence of 26 years in prison for the murder and weapons charges, prior to the addition of the hate crime enhancements. Woodward's bail was initially set at $5 million, but at hearing in November 2018, the judge decided to deny Woodward bail altogether, remanding him to custody pending trial.

Due to the COVID crisis, Woodward has remained in confinement since his last court appearance in 2018. His trial was tentatively scheduled to begin sometime in 2021, though a series of postponements pushed it back until July 15, 2022.

On July 15, 2022, an Orange County judge temporarily suspended criminal proceedings after Woodward's defense attorney said she had concerns about his competence to stand trial. In late October 2022, mental health experts deemed Woodward competent, and a pre-trial hearing was scheduled for January 2023. In a subsequent court hearing on February 20, 2024, jury selection for the trial commenced. The trial began in April.

In the opening statement for the defense, Woodward's attorney admitted to his client's guilt, but argued that the murder was neither premeditated nor motivated by homophobia or anti-semitism. Instead, the defense argued, Bernstein shared flirtatious messages between himself and Woodward on Tinder with other friends. Woodward, the defense claimed, wanted their relationship and any mention of his sexuality to remain between the two of them, as his father is homophobic, and known to call gay men "sodomites", among other terms.

The prosecution argued in their opening statements that online radicalization fomented Woodward's already-conservative upbringing into extremism, and that the murder of Blaze Bernstein was an anti-gay and anti-Jewish hate crime, mentioning several emails allegedly sent by Woodward, photographs of Woodward with known extremists, and Woodward's dropping out of Channel Islands to train with the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division in Texas.

In the opening days of the trial, Blaze's mother, Jeanne Pepper, took to the stand, establishing her family's religion as Jewish, and practicing, laying the framework for the prosecution's case. The defense focused on the text message exchanges between Blaze and Woodward. On July 3, 2024, 6 years after the murder, Woodward was found guilty of murdering him.