Catholic with neo-Nazi ties found guilty in California hate crime murder

An Orange County, California, jury found 26-year-old Samuel Woodward guilty on July 3 of a hate crime in the 2018 murder of Blaze Bernstein, a college student home for summer break when the two met after an encounter on a hookup app. 

The verdict on the first-degree murder charge brings to a close a nearly three-month trial in the case, which has brought attention to the influence of neo-Nazi groups on suburban American youth.

Woodward, a Newport Beach resident and college dropout who was 20 at the time of the murder, admitted to stabbing his former high school classmate 28 times after he allegedly threatened to expose his sexuality. Jurors deemed Woodward to have killed the University of Pennsylvania sophomore because he was gay.

“This was not a crime committed in the heat of passion; it was planned, it was carried out, and it was attempted to be covered up,” said Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer. 

“Samuel Woodward is someone who educated himself on how and who to hate, who surrounded himself with other people full of hate, and carried out the ultimate act of hate—brutally stabbing someone to death because they embody everything you hate simply because of who they love.”

Woodward, who has ties to neo-Nazism and White supremacist influences more broadly, kept a personal journal describing plans to meet gay men and spook them with threats of violence. He also posted messages in web forums connected to the Atomwaffen Division hate group that authorities have described as racist, homophobic, and antisemitic.

His social media activity included various far-right and other conservative musings, including defenses of the flag for the Confederate States of America. In what prosecutors described as his “hate diary,” Woodward made use of slurs against the LGBTQ+ community, despite reportedly struggling with his own sexuality.

His antisemitic attitudes are believed to have influenced his killing of Bernstein, whose family members are practicing Jews. Jeanne Pepper Bernstein, Blaze’s mother, welcomed the swift decision from the jury last month.

“It felt like my entire life and all of my challenges prepared me for that moment when we finally ended the trial and won the battle for Blaze and other LGBTQAI* who live afraid and rightly so,” she posted to social media on July 6.

“The process was emotionally exhausting and there was never going to be any hope of bringing Blaze back (which is the only thing we really want). Still, I ask myself, is it really over? Did we really win for Blaze and other good people who live in fear? Yes! We did it.”

Woodward’s family, whom he described as conservative Catholics, was portrayed by his attorney as homophobic, a characterization the family denied. His father, however, testified that Woodward’s older brother Clay was known to have called him anti-gay slurs during their youth.

As to whether Woodward’s Catholicism may have influenced his stark prejudices,  the jury remains out. Neither the family’s longtime pastor at Our Lady Queen of Angels Catholic Church in Newport Beach, Msgr Wilbur Davis, nor the current pastor, Fr Steve Sallot, responded to a request for comment from BCM.

At the parish’s Sunday Mass on July 7 following the verdict against Woodward, the usual prayer intentions of the liturgy featured a unique invocation “for all victims of disaster.”

“Whether it be by forces of nature or human violence, may they find solace of hope and recovery, we pray to the Lord.”

Woodward, who had been incarcerated at the Orange County Central Men's Jail in Santa Ana, faces a life sentence in prison without parole and is scheduled to be sentenced on Friday, October 25.

Nate Tinner-Williams is co-founder and editor of Black Catholic Messenger.

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