Samuel Woodward stabbed Blaze Bernstein to death in 2018 “because he was Jewish and gay,” said the victim’s mother.
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
A neo-Nazi was sentenced Friday to life in prison without parole for the 2018 murder of Jewish teen Blaze Bernstein.
“Let’s be clear, this was a hate crime,” the victim’s mother, Jeanne Pepper, said in court. “Samuel Woodward ended my son’s life because my son was Jewish and gay.”
Woodward knew Bernstein from California’s Orange County School of the Arts that they had both attended, and were friendly.
According to the police, they met up in a local park when Bernstein came home for winter break during his sophomore year at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a pre-med student.
The then-20-year-old stabbed his former classmate 28 times and buried him in a shallow grave that was found five days later.
This was a “victory for humanity,” Pepper told the press outside the California court building, after she and many other family members had attended the sentencing.
The jury found that this was a hate crime, she said, and the message the court had now given was that “hate isn’t going to get you anywhere in this world.”
The addition of the hate crime charge to that of murder was made due to Bernstein’s sexual preference, not his religion, the Los Angeles Times reported when the verdict was pronounced in July.
Although the jury agreed with this when pronouncing its verdict, the prosecution had also claimed that Woodward had killed Bernstein in an effort to seek the approval of a neo-Nazi group he was associated with, called the Atomwaffen Division.
The authorities found a slew of antisemitic, homophobic, and hate group materials on his personal devices when they searched his home after DNA evidence on Bernstein’s body led to him.
“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,” District Attorney Jennifer Walker said at the sentencing. “It’s only by the grace of God that rain happened, and they found his body.”
In his defense, Woodward had claimed that his younger friend had sexually propositioned him, and threatened to tell people that he was a homosexual. This had terrified him, he claimed, and caused him to pull out his knife, but he had had no intention of killing Bernstein.
To mitigate his client’s guilt, his public defender also tried using the argument that his client was on the autism spectrum, had obsessive-compulsive disorder, and had not really believed in the white supremacist ideology, just joining the group to have friends.
During the sentencing hearing, Judge Kimberly Menninger gave a nod to the defense, calling Woodward an “intelligent young man with lots of promise, but struggling with his sexual identity, his mental health and his loneliness and never receiving psychological support he so clearly needed.”
However, she said, evidence had been presented showing that Woodward had planned the murder ahead of time, and that it was very much a hate crime.
“Unfortunately for Mr. Woodward, the hate that fueled his thoughts was super disconcerting to this court and unfortunately reflects a larger societal ill that’s currently raging throughout this country,” she said.
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