BOY MEETS HATE
FROM HIS CAGE in the far back of a court-room in Newport Beach, California, Sam Woodward looked around. He appeared to stand on his tiptoes for a moment, peering through the bars at the gallery where his parents and a couple of family friends sat. He looked over at the judge and at his lawyer. He seemed confused and impatient. His hair, which had been combed neatly to the right in his yearbook photos, now fell in a loose mess around his ears. Usually clean-shaven, Sam sported a patchy, unkempt beard and a wiry mustache. A dirty undershirt poked through the collar of his orange jumpsuit.
Sam could see his mom, Michele, close to the front of the room. She was wearing a black blazer with black and white polka-dot pants. “I never thought I’d wear polka dots again,” Michele had told a friend in the hallway. “It seemed too cheerful.”
In between Sam and his family sat the counsel table, with a box for defense attorneys submitting paperwork. Pasted on the right side of the box was the David Mamet line: “Coffee is for closers only.”
Sam had been arrested on January 12, 2018, and charged with the murder of a former classmate, 19-year-old Blaze Bernstein. Police had found a knife stained with Blaze’s blood in Sam’s room, along with blood inside Sam’s car. Sam told police he had hung out with Blaze the night he disappeared.
By this time, ProPublica had revealed that Sam was a member of a militant Nazi group calling itself the Atomwaffen Division. According to the group’s private chat logs, he was something of an expert on fascist thought and had been entrusted with vetting new members to make sure they were committed revolutionaries.
Sam was a timely villain. Atomwaffen made its debut in 2015, a year that saw white nationalist thinking lifted from the fringe to mainstream debate. The group had been connected with four other murders by 2017, and their chat logs were full of invective about Jews and gay people. Blaze had been both.
I had come to Orange County because there was something gut-wrenchingly intimate about this murder. Sam and Blaze had barely known each other in high school, just a few years before. And yet, here they were at a late-night rendezvous where one ended up allegedly stabbing the other 19 times in the neck, until the blood spattered onto the roof of the car.
The case appeared, and was reported in the national press, as just another data point in the resurgence of American extremism. And maybe it was—but there was not any indication as to how this hate had developed.
Sam had acted almost as if he wanted to get caught. He had given police the flimsiest of alibis. He had kept a knife with Blaze’s blood in his room and told investigators he’d last seen Blaze in Borrego Park, where his body was found.
And now, he had pleaded not guilty. At the hearing, he kept glancing at the door. There was no smile of recognition when he saw his parents, just a look of insecurity. His lawyer had told reporters that Sam was depressed, that he felt bad for his family and was reading the Bible in jail.
I am a bisexual, Jewish man, just a few years older than Blaze was when he died. When I looked at his photos I saw myself, I saw family, and I saw friends. There was something cathartic to the tale of a neo-Nazi getting caught redhanded. But as I spoke with the people who knew Sam, reviewed court documents, and read thousands of pages of online messages, another story emerged. It was more complicated and sadder, in some ways,
