Blaze Bernstein was murdered in 2018 after he went to meet an acquaintance at a park and his death was declared to be a hate crime due to his sexuality and religious beliefs.
Blaze was born on April 27, 1998 in Orange County, California. His parents are Gideon Bernstein and Jeanne Pepper. They met in 1987 when they were both attending the University of California Santa Barbara. They were married in 1992. They are members of University Synagogue.
Gideon is an equity partner at Leisure Capital Management. Jeanne earned her law degree in 1995 from Pepperdine School of Law. In 2000, she retired to raise Blaze and his two siblings, Beaue and Jay.
As some additional background into his family, Blaze’s paternal grandmother Leah Bernstein was born in Romania in 1936 and is one of the few living holocaust survivors.
Blaze was named for his grandfathers, Nathan and Chaim and also for the 17th century French polymath Blaise Pascal.
Blaze’s family have said that he was a brilliant teenager with a good sense of humour. They also said he had a generous and gentle heart.
Blaze loved cooking, music, art, performing and writing.
Blaze graduated from the Orange County School of Arts and he went onto the University of Pennsylvania.
While he was there, he worked as a copy editor for the Penn Review and the University’s food magazine Penn Appetit.
Blaze was passionate about improving the university’s safety and he worked to reform Campus policy.
According to the Rabbi Arnold Rachlis and quoted from Forward Magazine: “He was one of these kids that absorbed every experience and did something with it,” and “[h]e was not somebody who just went through life, he took experiences as a gift and saw them as part of the whole.”
Close family friend, Dr. Michelle Aszterbaum remembers that, “Blaze was up for all of the crazy adventures of the Bernstein family vacations. Whether fording The Narrows of Zion Park with full-body dry suits, hiking with crampons on a glacier in Iceland, kayaking in freezing rain in a glacier lagoon, driving until 3:00 am to the next AirBnB—he was up for it all.”
Blaze’s family have a great website for him and the organization they have set up in his honor – BlazeBernstein.org
In January 2018, Blaze had traveled back to California to visit his family for winter break. He was due to fly back to Pennsylvania around January 7.
Adding as it’s important to the story from here on, Blaze was openly gay.
On the night of January 2, 2018, Blaze went to Lake Forest’s Borrego Park. He was picked up by Samuel Woodward, who was 20 at the time. The two were acquaintances who had attended the same high school.
The story that Samuel would later tell police was that Blaze had texted him earlier in the evening, asking for a ride to the park. Blaze said that he was going to meet someone there. Samuel said that he agreed and drove Blaze to the park at around 10.30pm. Blaze got out of the car and walked into the park alone. Samuel said he waited in the car.
Samuel started to text Blaze when he did not return. Blaze did not reply to any of the messages. Samuel said he left but returned hours later to look for Blaze.
Blaze only took the phone with him. He had nothing else – no keys, wallet, credit cards or his glasses. The phone he was using had been lent to him by a family member.
Soon after Blaze went into the park, the phone stopped receiving calls and a location tracker on the phone also stopped working.
“He didn’t have anything with him,” Blaze’s friend Della Donna told CBS Los Angeles. “He didn’t have his glasses or his medication. He didn’t bring his wallet or a phone charger. I don’t think he planned on this being a long trip and he just disappeared.”
Blaze’s family realized that he was missing on January 3 when he failed to attend a dentist appointment.
On January 8, Jeanne spoke to the media and pleaded for Blaze’s return.
“If there’s any way you can come home, whatever has happened, wherever you’ve been, whoever you’ve talked to — it doesn’t matter,” she said. “We love you so much that we would give up everything. We have to have you back.”
“The fact that he didn’t tell us he was going out tells us that he wasn’t planning to be gone very long,” Jeanne said.
While Blaze was missing, the Sheriff’s department said that Samuel was only considered to be a witness and not a suspect.
Drones were used in the search for Blaze. “It’s going to take a lot of time to go through all the data they collected.” Jeanne said. “We are only just beginning. The world is a big place and we are hunting aggressively for answers.”
“The only thing I can think of is that maybe he was abducted,” Jeanne also said to NBC. “I can’t figure out why anybody would want to hurt my son.”
On January 10, 2018, Blaze’s body was found during a search of the park. His body was found in an area that had been previously searched, but recent rain made his body able to be discovered.
His death was said to be a homicide and an autopsy was performed and Blaze was found to have been stabbed 28 times in the face and neck.
“Based on what we know, I believe Blaze was probably killed that night,” said Lt. Brad Valentine, the chief of police services for the City of Lake Forest at a press conference on the day Blaze was found.
“There has kind of been some rumors about them meeting a third person,” says Carrie Braun, a spokeswoman for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. “I don’t have specific information on that. At this point, the best thing to say is our investigators are actively following up on every lead that they can that will lead to an arrest of a suspect in this case.”
Blaze’s father also spoke after his son was found. “Needless to say, our family is devastated by the news. We — like so many of you around the world — love Blaze and wanted nothing more than his safe return,” Gideon added.
On January 12, 2018, Samuel Woodward, the friend who was with Blaze on the night he vanished, was arrested.
“Based on inconsistencies in the story of [Woodward], we focused on him as a suspect,” Orange County Undersheriff Don Barnes said. He was later arrested when crime lab technicians confirmed that blood found on a sleeping bag in Samuel’s possession belonged to Blaze.
As mentioned, the two men had attended high school together. Samuel was older than Blaze but they were acquainted with each other. The two matched on Tinder and they started communicating on Snapchat.
Samuel told police that he agreed to pick up Blaze on January 2. He said he drove them to the parking lot of a Hobby Lobby to ‘hang out’ and ‘catch up’. He took snacks, drinks and marijuana with him.
Samuel told police that Blaze had tried to kiss him on the lips on the night of January 2, 2018. Samuel said that he rejected Blaze’s advances. Police said that when he was recounting what happened, Samuel clenched his jaw and said “he wanted to tell Blaze to get off of him.”
Samuel kept up the ruse that Blaze had walked into the park alone. He said that he waited for an hour and tried to contact him on SnapChat. He said he left at around 1am and drove to his girlfriend’s home. He went back to the park at 3.40am and was still unable to find Blaze.
Samuel told detectives that Blaze had complained about his grades in school and that he “seemed depressed but never said anything about wanting to hurt himself.”
Detectives who spoke to Samuel two days after Blaze disappeared noticed his hands appeared to have small scratches on them and he appeared to have “dirt under his fingernails.” Samuel told detectives that the scratches and abrasions occurred during a “fight club.” Police asked Samuel how his hands got so dirty and he said he ‘fell into a dirt puddle’ during the fight club.
Police would say that Samuel seemed nervous during questioning and was ‘breathing heavy, talking fast and visibly shaking.’
Samuel opened the doors to his rental car and allowed police to look inside. They noticed that there was camping equipment inside, as well as a large empty bin on the backseat and a belt on the passenger side floorboard. I believe this is where they found the bloody sleeping bag.
“On their way out of Sheriff’s Headquarters, (investigators) noticed every door (the friend) had to touch on the way out of the building he pulled his jacket over his hand to prevent his hand and fingers from touching any part of the doors he touched.”
According to the affidavit, Samuel was known in high school for being a political conservative and he defended controversial symbols like the Confederate flag. A source told the media that Samuel “was as anti-Semitic as you can get.”
It was also revealed that Samuel was a member of a neo-Nazi group called Atomwaffen Division. This info about the group is from slate.com:
A glance at the Atomwaffen website—an unsettling but juvenile site that plays on the dramatic imagery of the Third Reich and apocalyptic video games—shows that even beyond its hateful ideology, the group exists to prime young men for violence. It appears to target these angry young men with promises of “hunting, adventuring, and … urban exploring,” as well as “militant training” in support of its goals of fascism and racial violence.
Its website complains that the “failure of democracy and capitalism has given way to the Jewish oligarchies and the globalist bankers” and promises real-life action (“no keyboard-warriorism”). It celebrates Hitler and Charles Manson as its heroes. According to ProPublica, its ultimate goal is to overthrow the U.S. government “through the use of terrorism and guerrilla warfare.”
At one point, Samuel went to Texas to attend a three-day training camp, also known as a ‘hate camp.’ While there, he learned skills related to hand-to-hand combat, firearms and survival.
It was said in 2018 that Blaze’s murder was the fifth allegedly connected to the neo-Nazi group.
In terms of Samuel’s background, he was born in Newport Beach, California. He did attend the same school as Blaze for a short period of time. His father kicked him out due to multiple reports of Samuel becoming a misandrist to gay men. He finished his schooling at Corona Del Mar High School. He went on to attend California State University Channel Islands for two semesters before he dropped out.
In 2018, Samuel complained to a friend that he could not establish any meaningful relationships. He said he would even leave the house and drive to a parking lot and sit there alone, just to give his parents the impression he was out with friends. Dylan Gronendyke, one of Samuel’s seemingly only contacts, encouraged him to return to college and to keep trying to make friends.
I believe that Samuel was arrested on the day of Blaze’s funeral. Blaze’s parents made this statement:
We are saddened to hear, on the day we laid our son to rest, that gruesome details of the cause of his death were published. Our son was a beautiful gentle soul who we loved more than anything. We were proud of everything he did and who he was. He had nothing to hide. We are in solidarity with our son and the LGBTQ community. There is still much discovery to be done and if it is determined that this was a hate crime, we will cry not only for our son, but for LGBTQ people everywhere that live in fear or who have been victims of hate crime.
Samuel was charged with murder and personal use of a deadly weapon. Later in 2018, two charges of committing a hate crime due to Blaze’s sexual orientation were added.
The legal process moved very slowly in this case. Semual was facing a sentence of life without parole. He initially faced a max sentence of 26 years in prison for the murder and weapons charges, but this changed to life in prison once the hate crime charges were added.
His bail was initially set at $5m, but in November 2018, the judge denied Samuel bail altogether and ordered him to remain in custody pending the trial.
The trial was first scheduled to start in 2021. That original date was pushed back to July 2022. On July 15, 2022, the judge temporarily suspended the criminal proceedings after Samuel’s attorney said she had concerns about his competence. His attorney stated that he has Asperger syndrome, autism and OCD.
In October 2022, Samuel was deemed competent and a pre-trial hearing was scheduled for January 2023. Jury selection for the trial finally started on February 20, 2024. Samuel had an outburst in the courtroom at this time and he threw a cup of water at the judge.
The trial finally began in April 2024.
Samuel’s attorney Ken Morrison said in his opening statement that Samuel had killed Blaze but the murder was not premeditated or motivated by hate. The attorney argued that Blaze had done something to provoke Samuel which caused Samuel to snap. Ken also spoke about how Samuel had been diagnosed with autism. He said revealing the diagnosis was not an effort to excuse the crime, but to help jurors understand his state of mind and the challenges he faced.
“Samuel Lincoln Woodward should be held accountable for what he did,” Ken said. “He should not be held accountable for what he did not do. This case was over-charged.”
Blaze had been texting friends about his possible meet up with Samuel. According to forward.com, Blaze ‘gleefully texted’ friends about the prospect of seducing the ultra-Conservative Samuel. He told Samuel that he would keep their conversations private.
Lead prosecutor Jennifer Walker said in her opening statements that after Blaze had invited Samuel to meet up, Samuel took an Atomwaffen mask, a folding knife and a shovel with him.
Jennifer also said that Samuel’s ‘prey was gay people.’ She also introduced testimony of Jeanne and asked about the family’s religion and race. ‘We are a Jewish family.’ said Jeanne.
During the trial, we learned that Samuel and Blaze had started conversing six months before the murder. They first matched on Tinder in June 2017. Blaze ‘super liked’ Samuel and Samuel liked him in return. Blaze sent him a message saying ‘Wait, Sam Woodward? Is that you?’
Blaze was shocked to see Samuel in a gay dating context online. He screenshotted Samuel’s profile and sent it to two friends who had also gone to their high school. He told one of the friends that having sex with Samuel would be ‘legendary.’ He would give his friends regular updates as he flirted with Samuel. Samuel had been rumoured in Blaze’s group to be closeted and Blaze said that the Tinder exchange was proof of that. “We all knew it,” Blaze wrote.
Samuel told Blaze on Tinder that he had been looking for Black women to hook up with and also guys to go deer hunting with. He said he only matched with Blaze because he wanted to catch up. Despite this, Blaze told Samuel he was cute, and Samuel replied ‘you’re not too shabby looking yourself.’
At one point, Blaze told Samuel that he was at home and was working on a birthday gift for a friend. Samuel offered to drive over and help him. Blaze refused and said it would be too complicated because his family were home.
Samuel asked Blaze about his sexuality and then revealed that he had been ‘kinda dishonest’ with Blaze. He said he had been curious about how Blaze would reply if he said he was into him. Blaze seemed annoyed by this but let it go. The two stopped talking at this time.
Six months later, on January 2, 2018, the two matched on Tinder again. Samuel apologised at this time to Blaze about their previous interactions. He said he had been ‘going through a weird time.’ He also alluded to having suffered drug addiction but said that he had recovered. Blaze said that he was glad Samuel was better but that he also did not really care.
Samuel asked ‘Why did you like me if you didn’t care? I’m confused.” Blaze told Samuel that he thought he was attractive and that he hadn’t recognised him at first. He also said that he did not think Samuel was straight.
Samuel asked Blaze if anyone was reading over his shoulder, and then he said “I might make an exception for you.”
Blaze replied ‘We’ve already done this prank, Sam.’ Samuel then asked if Blaze had Snapchat and the two moved over to that platform to keep chatting.
On Snapchat, messages disappear unless the user chooses to save them. The only saved message between Samuel and Blaze was when Blaze sent the family’s home address at 10.37pm on January 2.
Samuel got into his car immediately and drove to Blaze’s home.
Fifty nine minutes later, at 11.36pm, Blaze sent this message to his friend Lily. “I did something really horrible for the story,” he wrote.
He sent another message a few seconds later: “But also no one can ever know.”
When Jeanne testified at the trial, she spoke about how she discovered Blaze was ‘not heterosexual’ by reading his texts when he was 13. Jeanne said that she and Gideon told Blaze at the time that his sexual orientation was not important to them and that ‘we knew.’ Jeanne did say that it took her a while to come to terms with it. “I always pictured him walking down the aisle with a lady on his arm,” she said. “When I realized that it was never going to happen that way, it was shocking to me.”
Jeanne also spoke about the events of January 2, 2018. She said that she and Blaze went to Costco. They then prepared ‘a feast’ and Blaze’s paternal grandparents came over for dinner.
Blaze never told his mother that he was going out that night. When he did not come out from his bedroom the following day, Jeanne assumed he was sleeping in. She only became concerned after he missed his dental appointment that afternoon. Jeanne left a message with Barbara, their housekeeper and asked if she had seen Blaze. Barbara told Jeanne that Blaze was not in his room when she went to clean it and that he had not been home all morning.
Samuel spent five days testifying during the trial. He would often take up to 30 seconds to respond to a yes or no question.
Ken spoke about how Samuel had struggled throughout his life and that he was not diagnosed with autism until he was 18. This meant it was generally too late for prescribed interventions that may have helped. Ken said that Samuel’s diagnosis made it difficult for him to communicate and led to him being socially awkward and lonely. He also said that the late diagnosis had made him vulnerable and it explained why he was enticed by the Attomwaffen Division.
Ken said that Samuel was attracted to the group due to a sense of belonging, a ‘brotherhood’ of ‘strong men’.
Samuel told a psychiatric expert, Martha Rogers, that he did not pay any attention to the hate spewed by the group but enjoyed the positive reinforcement from them.
DA Jennifer Walker alleged that Samuel was getting ready to run and hide with the group before Blaze’s body was found.
“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,” she said. “It’s only by the grace of God that rain happened, and they found his body.”
During the trial we learned more about Samuel’s background. His father was said to be homophobic. Samuel kept a journal where he wrote about how he had humiliated gay males by leading them on, calling them ‘sodomites’ and other slurs.
One journal entry presented in court was titled ‘diary of hate’. In that, Samuel spoke about threats he made to gay people online.
He also sent emails to himself under the heading ‘Sam’s Diary’.
‘I tell sodomites that I’m bi-curious, which makes them want to ‘convert’ me … Get them hooked by acting coy, maybe send them a pic or two, beat around the bush and pretend to tell them that I like them and then kabam, I either un-friend them or tell them they have been pranked, ha ha,’ he wrote in one such email dated May 2017.
In another email he sent from July 2017, he wrote about downloading the gay dating app Grindr.
‘LMAO. They think they are going to get hate crimes and it scared the s*** out of them … Priceless.’
Ken also spoke about how Samuel thought Blaze was a ‘chill guy’. He also said that Samuel admired how comfortable Blaze was with being gay because Samuel had always struggled with accepting himself.
“Blaze Bernstein was in a lot of ways intimidating because he had qualities [Woodward] thought he lacked,” Ken said. “Sam was questioning all these things, looking for strong men, something he aspired to be.’”
Samuel testified about the night he met up with Blaze. He said he took two hits of marijuana and felt like he was falling asleep. He then said he felt a strange sensation on his legs and immediately thought that he had urinated on himself. He had done this previously at another time.
He came to and said that he realised his pants were undone and Blaze had his hand on his groin. He alleged that Blaze was photographing or videoing the scene.
Samuel panicked and said he was in ‘mortal terror’ that his homophobic family would find out. He said the ‘look’ on his father’s face alone could be so upsetting. He struggled with Blaze to get the phone away from him. Samuel alleged that Blaze was saying he would ‘out’ Samuel.
Samuel was unable to get the phone off Blaze. He said he snapped and repeatedly stabbed Blaze and then smashed the phone.
Samuel said he dug a shallow grave with his hands and he left Blaze’s body in the park.
After Blaze vanished, his parents went through his social media. They called Samuel, and he lied to them about the events of January 2.
DA Jennifer Walker said that after the murder, Samuel began searching for information online about DNA and he even got a haircut to change his appearance. “The abundance of evidence here is overwhelming,” she said.
On July 3, 2024, after a trial that ran for almost three months, Samuel was found guilty of first-degree murder, as well as the hate crime charges. People in the courtroom cheered as the verdict was read, particularly when the hate crime allegation was found to be true, “I understand that it’s emotional, but I just can’t have that,” Judge Menninger said.
Samuel’s sentencing is scheduled for Oct. 25. He faces life without the possibility of parole.
DA Jennifer Walker said “I’m just so happy for the Bernsteins because it has been a very painful process,” she said at the press briefing.
Following the verdict, Jeanne, thanked everyone who has supported the family since Blaze’s death. She also asked the media to give the family time to “process this outcome and to live our lives knowing that this murderer will no longer be able to hurt any other people.
“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,” she said.
This statement is from BlazeBernstein.org:
While his family will age and grow old, Blaze will stay forever young. Blaze wrote in his college entrance essay, “As I change, [my words] change, but even after days or months or years I can still find a version of myself (a time traveler from the past, present, or future) sitting there in the text and waiting to speak to me.” So, his loved ones wait for Blaze to speak to them, “a time traveler from the past,” as they read what is left of him and his beautiful voice.
SOURCE LIST –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Blaze_Bernstein
https://www.timesofisrael.com/jewish-college-student-blaze-bernstein-19-goes-missing-in-california
https://forward.com/news/601567/blaze-bernstein-final-texts-revealed-woodward-murder-trial
BlazeBernstein.org