“It was the beginning of hell,” the father of Blaze Bernstein recalled during testimony Thursday about learning in January 2018 that his son was missing, leading to a massive search that ended nearly a week later with the discovery of the young man’s body in a makeshift grave at the edge of a Lake Forest park.
Bernstein’s mother and father took the stand Thursday in a Santa Ana courtroom in the midst of the Orange County Superior Court trial of Sam Woodward, a former Orange County School of the Arts classmate accused of stabbing Bernstein to death because Bernstein was gay.
Woodward’s attorney acknowledged earlier this week at the outset of the trial that Woodward killed Bernstein, but denied it was a hate crime. Such a jury determination would result in a longer prison sentence.
Bernstein was a 19-year-old pre-med University of Pennsylvania student who at the time of his death was staying at his family’s Lake Forest home while on winter break. Woodward had dropped out of college and spent time in Texas with a neo-Nazi group before returning to live at his family’s Newport Beach home.
On Jan. 2, 2018, the Bernstein family gathered for a belated “Thanksgiving” meal to make up for the holiday gathering their son had missed while he was off at college. Blaze himself served as the chef, his mother, Jeanne Pepper, testified.
“He cooked an amazing dinner for the family, like a feast,” the mother said. “I was really blown away.”
Bernstein was still awake when his parents went to sleep. Unbeknownst to his mother and father, Bernstein later that night met up with Woodward, who apparently killed Bernstein at nearby Borrego Park.
“He normally would tell us if he was going out,” Pepper testified, “But he didn’t have to tell us. He was over 18. It was a courtesy.”
“We didn’t have any rules about that, unfortunately,” the mother added.
Bernstein’s parents didn’t think anything about not seeing him the following morning, assuming he was sleeping in. But when Bernstein didn’t respond to phone calls and failed to show up to an appointment he and his mother shared at a Huntington Beach dental office, their anxiety increased.
After the appointment, the mother said she called a housekeeper who had visited their home earlier in the day.
“I said ‘Did you see Blaze this morning?’ She said, ‘He wasn’t in his room, the bed was made when I went in there this morning,” Pepper said.
“I screamed at the top of my lungs when I heard that,” the mother added.
Bernstein’s father, Gideon, said he rushed home after his wife called him at his office.
“It was the beginning of hell,” the father said.
The parents looked in their son’s room and spotted numerous items he normally would have brought with him if he planned to leave the house for an extended period of time.
“His car keys were there, His glasses were on his desk, his wallet was there,” the father testified, choking back emotion. “His suitcase was opened up on the floor with all his clothes folded neatly, ready for him to fly back to school in a few days.”
The parents reached out to friends for advice. A deputy stopped by the house, but the parents said he dissuaded them from immediately reporting their son missing.
“The defining moment was when someone asked if we had checked any of his social media,” the father testified.
On their son’s Snapchat account the parents noticed messages the night before from Woodward, who they did not know and weren’t aware had gone to school with their son.
“It was some questions of Blaze about ‘where did you go?’, some expletives, and it was a narrative that went on for a bunch of unanswered messages,” the father said of the Snapchat messages from Woodward.
The parents reached out to Woodward through their son’s Snapchat account.
He spoke to them by phone, a call the father put on speakerphone and which his daughter recorded on another phone. The video footage was shown in court on Thursday, the first time jurors have heard Woodward speak at length during the trial.
“We were trying to solve a mystery of what happened to Blaze, and I thought it was important to document every part of it until we found out who did it,” the father said of their decision to record their call with Woodward.
Woodward during the phone call told the parents that Blaze had told him he was meeting another person at the park, had walked away from Woodward’s car and never returned.
“I’m sorry, I thought Blaze was just pulling a prank on me or some (expletive) like that,” Woodward said.
“I’m scared now,” he later added.
The parents pushed Woodward to provide them as many details as he could. He told them he didn’t know who the third person he claimed Woodward had left to meet was.
“You are the first real clue to the puzzle here,” the father said as he asked Woodward for help.
“I want to find Blaze as much as you do,” Woodward told the father at one point during the call.
The parents were immediately suspicious of Woodward, they testified. They knew Borrego Park well, since their children had grown up playing soccer there and it was next to an elementary school they attended. And they testified that the description Woodward was providing of where he claimed their son walked off to didn’t make sense.
“I was concerned, because he sounded like he was lying — very anxious and nervous on the phone, and some of the things (he said) didn’t make sense to me,” Pepper testified. “It was gnawing at me, all these inconsistencies.”
For six days, an “army” of friends and supporters helped with a widespread search for Bernstein, the parents said.
“I walked every square meter of that park,” the father testified as he fought back tears. “I was all over that thing. Yelling Blaze’s name.”
The search ended with the discovery of Bernstein’s body at the edge of the park. He had been stabbed more than 20 times. Woodward was quickly arrested.
Among the forensic evidence investigators used to tie Woodward to Bernstein’s slaying is a knife found in Woodward’s room with blood on the tip and handle that was matched through DNA to Bernstein, as well as blood stains in Woodward’s car they matched to both young men.
Deputy District Attorney Jennifer Walker alleges that Woodward — who grew up in a conservative, religious family — had anti-gay, antisemitic beliefs that led him to join the Atomwaffen Division, an armed fascist organization. The prosecutor said Woodward had a “hate diary” in which he wrote explicitly entries describing matching up with gay men on dating websites and “ghosting” or scaring them.
Assistant Public Defender Ken Morrison has countered that Woodward was more conflicted about his sexuality and was on the Autism spectrum. The defense attorney showed the jury exchanges between Woodward and Bernstein on the dating app Tinder in which Woodward at times appeared to be flirting with Bernstein, including on the day of the killing. Despite assuring Woodward that he was keeping their conversations a secret, Bernstein was actually relaying the details to some of his friends.
