A 27-year-old man will be sentenced Friday in an Orange County courthouse for the 2018 murder of a former gay classmate.
Samuel Lincoln Woodward faces life in prison without the possibility of parole for fatally stabbing 19-year-old Blaze Bernstein.
The Newport Beach Man was found guilty in July for the death of Bernstein, whose body was found days later after he went missingstabbed more than 28 times and buried in a shallow grave in a Lake Forest Park.
DNA evidence linked Woodward to the murder, and his cell phone was inside wealth of anti-gay, anti-Semitic and hate group materialauthorities said.
The prosecutor had argued for Woodward to be found guilty of first-degree murder as a hate crime because of the victim’s sexual orientation, not because he was Jewish. Defense attorneys argued that Woodward should be convicted of voluntary manslaughter and acquitted of hate crime charges.
Woodward admitted to stabbing Bernstein, a 19-year-old gay Jewish man, multiple times in 2018 but pleaded not guilty to murder with a hate crime enhancement.
The jury reached its verdict after just one day of deliberation.
Woodward and Bernstein attended Orange County School of the Arts together for four years. Bernstein graduated after six years at the school and became a pre-med student at the University of Pennsylvania.
The sophomore was home for winter break and visiting his family in 2018 when he was killed.
