A California man who expressed allegiance to a neo-Nazi group and espoused anti-gay rhetoric was sentenced to life in prison on Friday after a jury found him guilty of brutally killing a former high school classmate who was gay in a hate-motivated murder, the Orange County District Attorney’s office said.
The man, Samuel Lincoln Woodward, 26, of Newport Beach, Calif., had reconnected with his former classmate, Blaze Bernstein, then a 19-year-old student at the University of Pennsylvania, on a dating app for men seeking men, the authorities said.
On the evening of Jan. 2, 2018, Mr. Woodward drove Mr. Bernstein, who believed they were going on a romantic encounter, to a park in Lake Forest, Calif., where Mr. Woodward brutally stabbed Mr. Bernstein 28 times and buried his body in a shallow grave in the park, the district attorney’s office said.
On Friday, more than four months after a jury found Mr. Woodward guilty of first-degree murder with a hate crime enhancement, a judge in the Superior Court of Orange County sentenced Mr. Woodward to life in prison without parole, according to court records.
“With every hateful stab of his knife, Samuel Woodward stabbed at the very heart of our entire community,” Todd Spitzer, the district attorney for Orange County, said in a statement.
He added that “those who commit acts of hate against others will be punished and those who are victimized by hate will be protected.”
Mr. Woodward did not show remorse for his actions while he was in court or immediately after he killed Mr. Bernstein, The Los Angeles Times reported and the district attorney’s office said.
After he killed and buried Mr. Bernstein, Mr. Woodward sent a text to a friend that read “hey man, life is good,” prosecutors said.
Mr. Woodward’s lawyer, Kenneth Morrison, did not immediately respond to a phone call and an email seeking comment on Saturday evening.
When Mr. Bernstein, who was from Foothills Ranch, Calif., did not show up for a dentist appointment the next day, his family reported him missing and his mutilated body was found in Borrego Park one week later after heavy rains had washed away some of the dirt covering his makeshift grave, prosecutors said.
While he was missing, Mr. Bernstein’s parents went through his online activity and discovered that he had recently communicated with a former classmate at Orange County School of the Arts, a middle school and high school in Santa Ana, Calif.
“Woodward told the Bernsteins that he had met up with their son but that he had walked off into the park with an unknown person and he never saw” Mr. Bernstein again, the district attorney’s office said.
Mr. Bernstein’s blood was found on a skull mask that Mr. Woodward wore to show his allegiance to the group Atomwaffen, according to prosecutors.
Atomwaffen, which means “atomic weapons” in German, is a neo-Nazi hate group that attempts to use violence to sow chaos and hopes to bring about the collapse of the government and other institutions.
According to prosecutors, Mr. Woodward studied the group’s teachings and drew pictures related to the group.
Mr. Woodward also kept a “hate diary” that detailed his attempts to “lure gay men and boys into believing he was ‘bi curious,’ and then unfriending them,” prosecutors said. The diary also “contained numerous slurs referring to gay men,” according to prosecutors.
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