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Suspicion soon fell on 20-year-old Samuel Woodward, Bernstein’s former schoolmate at the Orange County School of the Arts, who had admitted to being with him in the park the night he disappeared. Investigators said they found Bernstein’s blood on a visor in Woodward’s car, and on a knife discovered in a drawer at the Newport Beach home where Woodward lived with his parents.
Bernstein was Jewish and gay, while Woodward, according to one of his attorneys, was conflicted about his sexuality. When investigators managed to hack into Woodward’s iPhone, they unearthed a trove of anti-gay, anti-Jewish material linked to the Atomwaffen Division, a white supremacist hate group.
The role that ideology may have played in Bernstein’s death will be sharply contested at his trial, with opening statements expected to begin Tuesday in Orange County Superior Court. Woodward is charged with murder, with enhancements for use of a deadly weapon and for hate crime, which could put him in prison for life without parole.
The exact defense strategy remains unclear, but one of Morrison’s aims will be to decouple his client’s alleged crimes from his client’s association with the Atomwaffen Division. The attorney has argued, with little success, to have references to Adolf Hitler and Nazis excluded from testimony on the basis that they are inflammatory.
[In a diary entry] from July 2017, [the defendant] wrote that he had downloaded the dating app Grindr and was amusing himself by threatening gay people.
“LMO,” he wrote, according to testimony. “They think they are going to get hate crimed and it scares the [poop] out of them ... Priceless.”
see also
Bernstein was Jewish and gay, while Woodward, according to one of his attorneys, was conflicted about his sexuality. When investigators managed to hack into Woodward’s iPhone, they unearthed a trove of anti-gay, anti-Jewish material linked to the Atomwaffen Division, a white supremacist hate group.
The role that ideology may have played in Bernstein’s death will be sharply contested at his trial, with opening statements expected to begin Tuesday in Orange County Superior Court. Woodward is charged with murder, with enhancements for use of a deadly weapon and for hate crime, which could put him in prison for life without parole.
The exact defense strategy remains unclear, but one of Morrison’s aims will be to decouple his client’s alleged crimes from his client’s association with the Atomwaffen Division. The attorney has argued, with little success, to have references to Adolf Hitler and Nazis excluded from testimony on the basis that they are inflammatory.
[In a diary entry] from July 2017, [the defendant] wrote that he had downloaded the dating app Grindr and was amusing himself by threatening gay people.
“LMO,” he wrote, according to testimony. “They think they are going to get hate crimed and it scares the [poop] out of them ... Priceless.”
see also