Blaze Bernstein Murder Suspect Reenacted Grisly White Supremacist Attack
By Dave Goldiner January 21, 2018
The high school classmate suspected of murdering Blaze Bernstein reportedly recreated a famed neo-Nazi attack from the big screen on social media.
Samuel Woodward, who posted white nationalist screeds on fringe sites, posted a photo of himself pretending to crush a friend’s skull against a concrete parking barrier, the New York Post reported.
It was apparently intended as a recreation of a stomping killing scene in “American History X,” a 1998 film starring Edward Norton as a neo-Nazi skinhead.
The photo sheds new light on the hateful rage that police say led Woodward to stab Bernstein more than 20 times in a park in their affluent Los Angeles suburb on January 3.
Woodward, 20, is facing murder charge, but police say they are investigating whether he will be charged with hate crimes.
He referred to Bernstein, a popular Jewish University of Pennsylvania student, by an anti-gay slur and told police Bernstein kissed him after they met hours before the killing.
Along with the photo, Woodward posted plenty of racist and violent material on social media sites, including a rape fantasy about an Asian high school English teacher.
“Anti-Semitism and homophobia were certainly aspects of his ideology,” one user who claimed to be close to Woodward told the paper.
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and the protests on college campuses.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
