Six and a half years after a weeklong community search ended with the discovery of Blaze Bernstein’s body in a makeshift grave at the edge of a Lake Forest community park, the former classmate who admitted to carrying out the killing was convicted Wednesday, July 3 of murder. An Orange County Superior Court jury, following a nearly three-month trial, deliberated for around eight hours before finding Samuel Woodward, now 26, guilty of first-degree murder for the January 2018 slaying of 19-year-old Bernstein, his former Orange County School of the Arts classmate. Jurors also determined that the killing was a hate crime, a finding that opens the door for a much longer prison sentence.
That Woodward was responsible for Bernstein’s violent slaying wasn’t in doubt — his defense attorney acknowledged to jurors from the outset of the trial that Woodward stabbed Bernstein to death. The question for jurors was whether the slaying was a murder driven by hate and the ideals of a Neo-Nazi group that Woodward had ties to, as alleged by prosecutors, or a deadly confrontation in the heat of passion and therefore voluntary manslaughter, as countered by the defense. Woodward and Bernstein were acquaintances, but not friends, during their overlapping time at the School of the Arts.
Bernstein, Jewish and gay, was quick-witted and intelligent, with a large group of friends. Woodward, on the Autism spectrum, struggled at the largely liberal campus, his conservative views and at-times homop.
