On January 2nd, 2018, a nineteen-year-old University of Pennsylvania sophomore slipped out of his parents' house in Lake Forest, California, to meet up with a former high school classmate. He left without his wallet, his glasses, or his keys. He never came home.
Blaze Bernstein was everything you'd want a kid to be. A pre-med student at an Ivy League school, the managing editor of a culinary magazine, a gifted writer who once said that writing gave him his voice. He was the oldest of three children in a tight-knit Jewish family, the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, and a young man who was just beginning to live openly and authentically as a gay man.
The person he went to meet that night was Samuel Woodward, a former classmate from the Orange County School of the Arts. What Blaze didn't know was that Woodward had become a trained member of the Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi terrorist organization that specifically targeted LGBTQ and Jewish people. He didn't know about the hate diary, the encrypted chat rooms, or the training camp in Texas. He didn't know that Woodward had brought a knife and a skull-faced terrorist mask to their meetup that night. This episode covers the full story. Blaze's life and the family that shaped him. Woodward's radicalization from a troubled kid in a homophobic household to a committed domestic terrorist. The seven-day search that gripped Orange County.
The rain that uncovered a shallow grave. The arrest, the evidence, and the six agonizing years it took to bring this case to trial. The testimony that exposed a killer's lies. And the verdict that finally held him accountable. It also covers what came after.
How the Bernstein family turned the worst moment of their lives into a movement called Blaze It Forward, and how a nineteen-year-old kid who loved food, writing, and people left a legacy that hatred could never erase. This is a difficult one. But it's a story that deserves to be heard.
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