Atomwaffen made its debut in 2015, a year that saw white nationalist thinking lifted from the fringe to mainstream debate. According to the group’s private chat logs, he was something of an expert on fascist thought and had been entrusted with vetting new members to make sure they were committed revolutionaries.
Sam told police he had hung out with Blaze the night he disappeared.īorrego Park was the last place where Sam Woodward said he saw Blaze Bernstein alive as he walked off in the moonlight.īy this time, ProPublica had revealed that Sam was a member of a militant Nazi group calling itself the Atomwaffen Division. Police had found a knife stained with Blaze’s blood in Sam’s room, along with blood inside Sam’s car. Sam had been arrested on January 12, 2018, and charged with the murder of a former classmate, 19-year-old Blaze Bernstein. Pasted on the right side of the box was the David Mamet line: “Coffee is for closers only.” In between Sam and his family sat the counsel table, with a box for defense attorneys submitting paperwork. “I never thought I’d wear polka dots again,” Michele had told a friend in the hallway. She was wearing a black blazer with black-and-white polka-dot pants. Sam could see his mom, Michele, close to the front of the room. A dirty undershirt poked through the collar of his orange jumpsuit. Usually clean-shaven, Sam sported a patchy, unkempt beard and a wiry mustache. His hair, which had been combed neatly to the right in his yearbook photos, now fell in a loose mess around his ears. He looked over at the judge and at his lawyer. He appeared to stand on his tiptoes for a moment, peering through the bars at the gallery where his parents and a couple of family friends sat. From his cage in the far back of a courtroom in Newport Beach, California, Sam Woodward looked around.