Finally, it’s over. It’s been almost 7 years since the senseless horrific murder of our son Blaze Bernstein. We can now speak out without jeopardizing the outcome of a fair jury trial.
This is what we know now: Sam Woodward confirmed during the trial that in the late evening of January 2nd, 2018, he took Blaze to the local park, and within thirty minutes of their arrival, stabbed him 28 times in the face, hands, and thigh with a six-inch blade. He then used a shovel, sleeping bag, and flashlight to bury our beloved child in a shallow grave in the park next to Blaze’s elementary school. Woodward’s face in an Atomwaffen mask was probably the last thing that Blaze saw as he lay mortally injured, bleeding to death in the farthest reaches of Borrego Park in Foothill Ranch. The next morning, Woodward texted a friend that things were “looking up”, that same afternoon we discovered Blaze was missing. Together, my family and I began our search using Blaze’s personal computer.
Through our investigation we discovered that Woodward was involved, and we contacted him on the phone that night. During the phone call he pretended that he knew nothing about Blaze’s whereabouts which then led to a massive search by law enforcement, friends, and our own private investigators.
During the week of his disappearance, we also discovered that Sam Woodward was a member of the extremist, neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division. We were horrified to find pictures of him curb-stomping Jews, posing with guns in an Atomwaffen mask alone and with others, and other social media displaying propaganda and hate speech related to Jews and those in the LGBTQIA community. We were distraught and knew right away that this was a hate crime.
This matches with GLAAD’s findings, which show that 18% of all anti-LGBTQ incidents since June 2022 also included antisemitic tropes or targeted Jewish persons.
There was no coincidence that Woodward, a fanatical follower of prominent neo-Nazis like James Mason, the author of “Siege,” killed Blaze, the son of a prominent Jewish leader in Orange County. My husband Gideon’s contributions to the Orange County Jewish community are well known. He was honored by the Merage Jewish Community Center and Jewish Federation of Orange County prior to Blaze’s murder. With this in mind, I see intention in this sequence of events and no coincidences.
Woodward delayed justice for over six years, all the while denying his guilt, making new excuses, and continuing to change his story as new evidence became public. During the trial, we had to listen to him and his public defender repeatedly speak horrible lies about our son and what he claimed happened that night. The truth is the defendant is a hateful bully trained, groomed, and encouraged by a notorious neo-Nazi, accelerationist hate group and its leader to murder innocent Jewish and LGBTQ individuals. Our boy died in a planned attack that he had no reason to suspect would occur. Blaze thought he was visiting a former Orange County School of the Arts classmate, when he walked into the defendant’s trap, never to return to the family that loves him and the incredible life and bright future that awaited him.
After the better part of a decade in our justice system, we are finally free from court delays, defamation of my son, and the inability to publicly defend my loved one’s memory for fear of it tainting the prospective jury pool. Over nearly seven years, this has caused my family repeated emotional harm. We sat silently and without any facial expression throughout the trial under threat of expulsion for influencing the jury. Imagine sitting through the trial of your child’s murderer, listening to gruesome details of the murder and outright lies about your child’s character and you cannot make even a peep?
Fortunately, and finally, justice has prevailed, and jurors did not believe the lies. While we always believed that this was a hate crime motivated by Woodward’s desire to elevate himself in the ranks of the extremist, neo-Nazi hate group, Atomwaffen Division, this trial left no doubt in our mind or the jurors’ that this was the targeted execution of a gay Jewish man. Tragically for us he chose our hope for the future …. Our son, nineteen-year-old Ivy League student Blaze Bernstein.
We are grateful for the conclusion of the fair trial that brought about a decisive verdict and a just sentence that will keep the man who killed our son off the streets.
Woodward may have stolen Blaze from the world, but he will never steal our joy in knowing that Atomwaffen Division is no more, and that our Blazeitforward movement has over 32,000 followers who do kind acts in honor of Blaze’s legacy of helping others. We will continue to celebrate the life of Blaze in the good work we do endowing the Merage JCC culinary school in his name, endowing scholarships at the Kelly Writers house at the University of Pennsylvania, creating college scholarships for worthy students, and donating to the causes and organizations that would make Blaze happy. We have made significant contributions to Children’s Hospital of Orange County, Orange County School of the Arts, Tilly’s Life Center, and NAMI to name a few, in his honor. We created the BlazeitForward community on Facebook and the PeppTalks with Jeanne podcast where we interview people and organizations that make this world a better place.
We did the best we could for our son; we figured out who did this, brought Woodward to justice, and saw justice carried out. We kept this world safer for good people everywhere. Hopefully, this will be a lesson to those who promote and proliferate hate in this world; when you hurt good people, they just work harder to make this world better. He may have taken Blaze, but no one will take away the joy we have found in giving back. No one will take away our hope of or our purpose in repairing the world, tikun Olam in Hebrew.
We want to give thanks to law enforcement including Sergeant Dylan Jantzen, Captain Jack Ackerman and district attorney Jennifer Walker who worked tirelessly for years to bring us justice and proved to us that good will never defeat evil. We also wanted to thank the jury, who selflessly gave up nearly half of their year to assure justice for Blaze. In the end, it is these outstanding citizens and the caring community surrounding us that give us hope for a better world, inspire us to keep Blaze’s legacy of kindness alive and sustain our faith in humanity. That’s why our call to action is for you to get involved with Blazeitforward, and for the press to amplify our son’s story of a gay and Jewish youth living in the USA. Please go to https://blazebernstein.org/ and take action with us today.
