Samuel Woodward, who espoused anti-gay rhetoric and had ties to Atomwaffen, a neo-Nazi group, stabbed his victim 28 times in a hate-fueled murder, prosecutors said.
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.”
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
