Sam Woodward, former member of Atomwaffen Division, was arrested in 2018 for murder of gay, Jewish pre-med student
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.
Yes, being intolerant of homophobia that habitually results in murders such as the one we’re discussing is totally equivalent to being intolerant of people practising the Jewish faith peacefully!
Sure, we can use your logic and pick a religion that causes more murders - after all, without many Jews, there aren’t many Jewish murderers. Would you prefer we swap to Islam or Christianity?
And don’t think I missed you saying “peacefully”. The proposed idea is that we incarcerate “peaceful” homophobes. That’s the whole topic here, because we already incarcerate the violent ones.
Hate and prejudice for a group of people cannot be peaceful, “peaceful homophobia” is an oxymoron.