Blaze Bernstein Murder Suspect Reenacted Grisly White Supremacist Attack

By Dave Goldiner January 21, 2018

The high school classmate suspected of murdering Blaze Bernstein reportedly recreated a famed neo-Nazi attack from the big screen on social media.

Samuel Woodward, who posted white nationalist screeds on fringe sites, posted a photo of himself pretending to crush a friend’s skull against a concrete parking barrier, the New York Post reported.

It was apparently intended as a recreation of a stomping killing scene in “American History X,” a 1998 film starring Edward Norton as a neo-Nazi skinhead.

The photo sheds new light on the hateful rage that police say led Woodward to stab Bernstein more than 20 times in a park in their affluent Los Angeles suburb on January 3.

Woodward, 20, is facing murder charge, but police say they are investigating whether he will be charged with hate crimes.

He referred to Bernstein, a popular Jewish University of Pennsylvania student, by an anti-gay slur and told police Bernstein kissed him after they met hours before the killing.

Along with the photo, Woodward posted plenty of racist and violent material on social media sites, including a rape fantasy about an Asian high school English teacher.

“Anti-Semitism and homophobia were certainly aspects of his ideology,” one user who claimed to be close to Woodward told the paper.

Dave Goldiner is the Forward’s director of digital media. Dave is a veteran journalist who has spent two decades working at newspapers in the United States and Africa. A native New Yorker, Goldiner wrote for the New York Daily News, where he covered some of the biggest stories of our time, including the attacks of September 11, along with thousands of stories of hope and heartbreak. He also studied and worked in Southern Africa and has written for publications in South Africa and Zimbabwe. He holds masters degrees in journalism and public administration from Columbia University. Dave can be reached at [email protected], or follow him on Twitter @davegoldiner

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