Where I had seen a story about the endgame of American Nazism, there was instead a web of high school drama, alienation, and unspoken fears.
It was more complicated and sadder, in some ways, than the one I’d anticipated. But as I spoke with the people who knew Sam, reviewed court documents, and read thousands of pages of online messages, another story emerged. There was something cathartic to the tale of a neo-Nazi getting caught red-handed. When I looked at his photos I saw myself, I saw family, and I saw friends. I am a bisexual, Jewish man, just a few years older than Blaze was when he died. They were waiting for guys like Sam with open arms. All he had needed for admission was hate and white skin. He believed he was part of something important, something revolutionary. His lawyer had told reporters that Sam was depressed, that he felt bad for his family and was reading the Bible in jail.Īs I traced Sam’s life, I found a young man entranced by the validation that nationalist thought promised.
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There was no smile of recognition when he saw his parents, just a look of insecurity. At the hearing, he kept glancing at the door. 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.Īnd now, he had pleaded not guilty. He had given police the flimsiest of alibis. Sam had acted almost as if he wanted to get caught. The rumors that Sam Woodward was interested in boys had been passed around at Orange County School of the Arts. And maybe it was-but there was not any indication as to how this hate had developed. The case appeared, and was reported in the national press, as just another data point in the resurgence of American extremism. 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. Sam and Blaze had barely known each other in high school, just a few years before. I had come to Orange County because there was something gut-wrenchingly intimate about this murder.
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The group had been connected with four other murders by 2017, and their chat logs were full of invective about Jews and gay people. Atomwaffen made its debut in 2015, a year that saw white nationalist thinking lifted from the fringe to mainstream debate. 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 told police he had hung out with Blaze the night he disappeared.īorrego Park was the last place where Sam Woodward said he saw Blaze Bernstein alive as he walked off in the moonlight.īy this time, ProPublica had revealed that Sam was a member of a militant Nazi group calling itself the Atomwaffen Division. Police had found a knife stained with Blaze’s blood in Sam’s room, along with blood inside Sam’s car.
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Sam had been arrested on January 12, 2018, and charged with the murder of a former classmate, 19-year-old Blaze Bernstein. Pasted on the right side of the box was the David Mamet line: “Coffee is for closers only.” In between Sam and his family sat the counsel table, with a box for defense attorneys submitting paperwork.
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“I never thought I’d wear polka dots again,” Michele had told a friend in the hallway. She was wearing a black blazer with black-and-white polka-dot pants. Sam could see his mom, Michele, close to the front of the room. A dirty undershirt poked through the collar of his orange jumpsuit. Usually clean-shaven, Sam sported a patchy, unkempt beard and a wiry mustache. His hair, which had been combed neatly to the right in his yearbook photos, now fell in a loose mess around his ears. He looked over at the judge and at his lawyer. 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. From his cage in the far back of a courtroom in Newport Beach, California, Sam Woodward looked around.