Greater than six years after College of Pennsylvania pupil Blaze Bernstein used to be killed, the Southern California guy charged with stabbing him to loss of life in an act of hate is anticipated to face trial.
Opening statements are scheduled for Tuesday within the homicide case in opposition to now-26-year-old Samuel Woodward from Newport Seaside, California. He has pleaded now not accountable.
Woodward is charged with stabbing to loss of life Bernstein, a 19-year-old homosexual, Jewish faculty sophomore who used to be house visiting his circle of relatives on wintry weather wreck. The 2 younger males had in the past attended the similar highschool in Orange County.
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Bernstein went lacking after he went out with Woodward to a park in Lake Wooded area, California, in January 2018. Bernstein’s oldsters discovered his glasses, pockets and bank cards in his bed room day after today when he neglected a dentist appointment and wasn’t responding to texts or calls, prosecutors wrote in a tribulation transient.
Days later, Bernstein’s frame used to be discovered buried on the park in a shallow grave.
Woodward picked Bernstein up from his oldsters’ house after connecting with him on Snapchat and stabbed him just about 20 instances within the face and neck, government stated.
Samuel Woodward is noticed after a court docket listening to on the Harbor Justice Heart in Newport Seaside, California, on Aug. 22, 2018. Opening statements are scheduled for April 9, 2024, within the trial of Woodward, who is charged with stabbing College of Pennsylvania pupil Blaze Bernstein to loss of life in an act of hate in 2018. (Paul Bersebach/The Orange County Check in/SCNG by the use of AP, Pool, Report)
DNA proof related Woodward to the killing and his mobile phone contained troves of anti-gay, antisemitic and hate team fabrics, government stated.
Woodward sought to turn out to be a member of the neo-Nazi team Atomwaffen Department, which espoused white supremacy, a yr previous, in step with the prosecutors’ transient. He made magazine entries, together with one titled “diary of hate” that described threats he stated he had made to homosexual other people on-line, the transient stated.
A folding knife with a bloodied blade used to be present in Woodward’s room at his oldsters’ house within the upscale group of Newport Seaside, government stated. Woodward used to be arrested two days later.
Woodward has pleaded now not accountable to homicide with an enhancement for a hate crime.
The case took years to visit trial after questions arose about Woodward’s psychological state and following more than one adjustments of protection lawyers. Woodward used to be deemed competent to face trial in past due 2022.
One in every of Woodward’s earlier legal professionals stated his consumer has Asperger’s syndrome, a developmental dysfunction that typically reasons issue with social interactions, and struggled together with his personal sexuality.
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Ken Morrison, Woodward’s lawyer, suggested the general public to steer clear of leaping to conclusions concerning the case.
“For the previous six years, the general public has been studying and listening to a prosecution and muckraking narrative about this situation this is merely basically flawed,” Morrison wrote in an e mail. “I warning everybody to admire our judicial procedure and wait till a jury has been in a position to look, pay attention, and review the entire proof.”
The Orange County district lawyer’s workplace declined to remark at the case forward of trial.
