Killer of Blaze Bernstein Convicted of Hate Crime

After a three-week trial, the court convicted killer and neo-Nazi Samuel Woodward of first-degree murder with a hate crime enhancement for stabbing gay, Jewish student Blaze Bernstein. Twenty-six-year-old Woodward and 19-year-old Blaze were former classmates at Orange County School of the Arts.

During the trial, Woodward claimed the murder was a crime of passion, stating that he killed Blaze because he felt “anger like nothing I had ever felt in my whole life,” which led him to “just (keep) driving and driving and driving the knife down.” When his defense attorney asked if he remembered how many times he stabbed Blaze, he said, “No.”

The court added the hate crime enhancement to the charge due to the overwhelming evidence on Woodward’s phone and laptop revealing his affiliation with the neo-Nazi hate group Atomwaffen Division. According to LGBTQ Nation, “Woodward had over 100 pieces of extremist content on his phone at the time of the murder. Hateful material was found on his laptop and social media accounts as well, including racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic content.”

Authorities also confirmed that he dropped out of college to move to Texas, where he joined the group. Atomwaffen Division advocates for a violent, trained militia to destroy and overthrow democracy in favor of a white-ethnostate, neo-fascist, authoritarian government akin to Nazi Germany. They brazenly hurt and kill members of the LGBTQ+ community, the Jewish community, and many other minority groups.

Most noteworthy was Woodward’s defense. He claimed that his social awkwardness, stemming from his Autism, made him vulnerable to recruitment from Atomwaffen Division because they gave him the “validation and acceptance” he desperately needed. If his defense attorney aimed to tug on the heartstrings of the court by painting Woodward as an unfortunate social outcast with mental health issues, they furthered a very harmful stigma often associated with autistic men.

Social issues stemming from Autism don’t lead individuals down the path to joining a neo-Nazi hate group. Even if his family was conservative, abusive, religious, and homophobic like his defense focused on, he could just as well have joined online neurodivergent- and LGBTQ+-friendly support groups for socially awkward individuals that would have given him the same validation and acceptance he was supposedly searching for without turning him into an extremist weapon of hate.

Woodward claimed that moments before the murder, Bernstein had made a pass at him, and Woodward believed he had been recording him and had threatened to send pictures of his genitals to friends. No evidence was found of such recordings or pictures.

However, it was also revealed that Woodward matched with Bernstein on a dating app for gay men. Woodward joined the gay dating app, Grindr, posing as “gay curious” so that he could play a sick game of matching with men just to send them graphic pictures of gay men being killed, as well as calling them “f*gg*ts” before ghosting them.

He had a fascination with gay porn, as some was was found on his laptop, and he also kept a personal online “hate diary” detailing the joy he found in his sick game on Grindr. In one entry, he wrote, “They think they are going to be hate-crimed and it scares the **** out of them.” And yet, Woodward’s attorney Edward Munoz argued that his client should not be charged with an anti-gay hate crime enhancement because through all this, Woodward was dealing with an internal sexuality crisis. His attorney said the possibility that Woodward was gay or bi himself was enough evidence to support that he did not have a hateful heart when he committed the murder.

But just because someone may be struggling with internalized homophobia doesn’t mean they can’t commit hate crimes. Especially someone who actively posts hateful, racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic content on their social media pages and affiliates with terrorist organizations.

Orange County Senior Deputy District Attorney Jennifer Walker, who prosecuted the case, says, “He already had his bags; he was already talking to Atomwaffen people about going somewhere else, and he thought he was going to get away with it. It’s only by the grace of God that rain happened, and they found his body.”

Blaze’s mother, Jeanne Pepper Bernstein, told NBC News Los Angeles, “This is a great relief that justice was served and this despicable human who murdered our son will no longer be a threat to the public. Our family will now live our lives knowing that this murderer will no longer be able to hurt any other people.”

In a statement made after the verdict, she says, “No verdict can bring back Blaze. He was an amazing human and humanitarian and a person we were greatly looking forward to having in our lives, seeing wondrous things from him as his young life unfolded. From this funny, articulate, kind, intelligent, caring, and brilliant scientist, artist, writer, chef, and son, there will never be anyone quite like him. His gifts will never be realized or shared now.”

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