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.

  • otp@sh.itjust.works
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    7 months ago

    Ok, so you shared a video of someone who is intolerant. We should be intolerant of that intolerance.

    It doesn’t really have anything to do with the post, but I guess it’s good to find other examples? Lol

    • iopq@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      My point was people here will give anti-semites a free pass if they happen to support a cause they also support

      But it’s a huge mistake and will backfire

        • iopq@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          It’s out on the streets where nobody confronts these people for celebrating deaths of Israelis, supporting Houthis who regularly execute LGBT people, supporting Iranian terrorism.

          So many people think these allies on the Palestinian issue, but they are actually coopting the movement to spread absolute bullshit

          • otp@sh.itjust.works
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            7 months ago

            You said “people here”.

            “Out on the streets” is something very different.

            It seems like you brought up a local (to yourself) issue that’s only tangentially related to the topic at hand so you could get up on your soapbox, and wondered why you were getting downvoted. You also did it in a way that made it sound like you were being intolerant of a group of people by brushing them with broad strokes.

            • iopq@lemmy.world
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              7 months ago

              Not to myself, we see videos of these people “protesting” where they are cheering for terrorism, want to get rid of Israel completely, etc.

              Yet I see nobody on the left protest their intolerance, only the liberals do