Six years after his arrest, a former member of the Atomwaffen Division will face trial in a southern California courtroom over the killing of his former high school classmate – a murder that rocketed the neo-Nazi group to international notoriety and highlighted the wave of violence by far-right American extremists during the presidency of Donald Trump.
Sam Woodward was arrested on 15 January 2018 and charged with the murder of Blaze Bernstein, a former fellow student at the Orange County School of the Arts. Bernstein, a gay and Jewish pre-med student, had been missing for a week before his body was discovered in a shallow grave.
On the night of 10 January 2018, the two men met at Borrego Park in the Orange county city of Lake Forest, according to Orange county sheriff’s reports. Bernstein was home from the University of Pennsylvania on winter break, and re-established contact with his former high school classmate through Tinder, where the two had previously connected.
Bernstein did not hide his identity as a gay man. Although Woodward was not open about his, while in high school he made passes at more than one of his male classmates, according to reporting in Mother Jones.
Bernstein’s body was found with 19 stab wounds. Investigators’ attention quickly turned to Woodward, the well-off son of an observant, conservative Catholic family from Newport Beach.
In interviews with an investigator from the Orange county sheriff’s department shortly after Bernstein went missing, the investigator later testified in court, Woodward claimed his classmate had tried to kiss him that night at Borrego Park and that he found homosexuality “disgusting”.
Two days after Woodward spoke with the investigator, rain washed away the shallow layer of dirt that had covered Bernstein’s body. Police found a knife with Bernstein’s blood on the blade in Woodward’s room, and blood was also recovered from Woodward’s car.
Woodward was charged with murder and possession of a deadly weapon – charges that were appended in late 2018 with hate crime enhancements, following reporting by ProPublica on the Atomwaffen Division’s internal Discord server and on bigoted, anti-Jewish posts by Woodward there.
Woodward has pleaded not guilty.
Descent into neo-Nazism
On the exterior, Woodward in his teenage years cultivated a macho persona that bordered on racist, re-enacting the infamous curb-stomping scene from American History X with a friend in a photo he later posted on social media.
Though Woodward was an Eagle Scout, much of his social life took place online, particularly on the iFunny app, where he went by the handle “Saboteur” and found friendship with young neo-fascists. By early 2017, Woodward and a Texan friend who went by Kruuz were participating in the online chats of Vanguard America, a far-right group whose members included James Alex Fields Jr, the man found guilty of murdering Heather Heyer in Charlottesville.
Kruuz and Woodward sought out an even more radical group willing to take action, and fell into the orbit of the Atomwaffen Division, whose aggressive online propaganda and emphasis on armed white nationalist insurrection marked the outer bounds of the 2010s “alt-right” universe.
Woodward spent the summer of 2017 in Texas with Kruuz, working construction, drifting from one motel room to another, training in firearms with the Atomwaffen Division’s Texas cell, posing for propaganda photographs with fellow neo-Nazi militants and visiting the group’s ideologue, James Mason, in Denver.
By that fall, Woodward had moved back in with his parents in Newport Beach, working construction, boxing with another far-right group and hanging with Kruuz, who had moved west with Woodward and ran Atomwaffen’s California cell. It was at this stage of Woodward’s life, when he penned diary entries about “pranking” and “cucking” gay men he met on apps like Tinder and Grindr, that the budding neo-Nazi reconnected with Bernstein.
The threat of Atomwaffen
Bernstein’s death exposed to the world the shadowy and violent neo-fascist Atomwaffen, which had previously confined itself to flyering and online propaganda.
One Atomwaffen member pleaded guilty to the May 2017 homicides of two fellow members of the group in Tampa, Florida. Another member was charged over the Christmas 2017 killings of his ex-girlfriend’s parents in Virginia. In all, five deaths have been linked to the group.
Both the Florida and Virginia cases were dragged out over issues of mental competency. In May 2023, the Florida member pleaded guilty to the double homicide after previously being declared incompetent to stand trial. He received a life sentence. The Virginia member’s proceedings are ongoing over a number of challenges in state appeals courts about his alleged mental illnesses and the admissibility of his hospital-bed confession.
Woodward’s trial has faced similar lengthy delays. Woodward has switched defense attorneys several times since 2018, and his defense team has repeatedly highlighted his Asperger’s diagnosis as justification for why he should be declared unfit for trial.
In 2021, the then newly elected Orange county district attorney, Todd Spitzer, called the then three year delay (partially due to the Covid-19 pandemic) in Woodward’s case “unreasonable”, but was unable to advance the case until last summer. Jury selection was started and swiftly abandoned in early March after Woodward threw a cup of water at the judge.
Opening statements are slated to start on Monday, with the trial expected to last three months. In addition to the particulars of Bernstein’s killing, court proceedings will plumb the inner workings of the Atomwaffen Division: at least three former members of the neo-Nazi militant group are on the witness list.
If convicted, Woodward faces life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Atomwaffen was dismantled by a sprawling federal investigation that became public in 2020. The group is banned in Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia, where it spawned several offshoots. Its legacy has been bloody. Dozens of convicted militants, several copycat organizations and mass shooters in Buffalo, New York; El Paso, Texas; and Jacksonville, Florida have cited Atomwaffen’s message as their inspiration.
Woodward’s attorney, Ken Morrison of the Orange county public defender’s office, cautioned against prejudging his client’s guilt: “For the past 6 years, the public has been reading and hearing a prosecution and muckraking narrative about this case that is simply fundamentally wrong,” Morrison said. “I caution everyone to respect our judicial process and wait until a jury is able to see, hear and evaluate all the evidence before jumping to conclusions about exactly what happened.”
Bernstein’s mother, Jeanne Pepper Bernstein, has occasionally spoken to media, but Spitzer requested she limit her media exposure to avoid influencing potential jurors, according to a 2023 interview she gave to the Forward. In that conversation, she noted the impact her son’s killing had on his two siblings.
“The children that were 13 years old when this happened to Blaze are 18 now – they’re legal adults,” she said. “Are they ready to live in a world full of violence and hate? Have we done anything in the last five years to instill a sense of humanity in people? I don’t think so.”
This article was amended on 8 April 2024 to clarify that Woodward was an Eagle Scout, the highest rank in the Boy Scouts. An earlier version incorrectly said he participated in the Eagle Scouts.