From Talent to Tragedy, Unraveling the Blaze Bernstein Story

Welcome to the Eastern Crime Zone, the podcast that takes you inside investigations of real, true crime cases. I'm your host, cassie Millay, and each week I'll guide you through the twists and turns of some of the most fascinating cases in history. For those familiar to the obscure, we'll dive deep into the details and explore new angles you've never considered before. But I don't want this to be a one-sided conversation. I want to hear from you too. If there's a case that's been on your mind, head on over to EasternCrimeZonecom to leave me a voicemail, or slide into my DMs on Instagram at EasternCrimeZone. Who knows, your suggestion might just be featured on an upcoming episode. So sit back, grab your detective hat and get ready for a journey through the criminal underworld. This is Eastern Crime Zone. I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season this year. I know for sure that I did. We got together Christmas Eve with my sister, her husband, my parents and we ate, talked, opened presents. It was super fun. Unfortunately, I did miss the rest of my family because I had the flu. I woke up Christmas morning feeling like my bones were trying to crawl their way out of my skin suit. It was absolutely awful. I laid in bed for five or six days, even though I was out of PTO at work. So my paycheck next week is going to suck, but I am very happy to be sitting here and feeling relatively decent and ready to give you another case. I'm really hoping that 2024 is like my year, because 2023 was not my year. Actually, I'd say 2023 was like my sister's year, because she got married, bought a house and we both saw Taylor Swift. That was clutch. Thank you, alex, for paying for that. She's the best sister. Anyway, it was really her year. So I'm really hoping next year is my year, but odds are I probably won't. So we'll see. We'll see how that goes. Thoughts and prayers to me, because 2023 was not it at all. I did want to show y'all one thing before we get into today's case, because obviously on this podcast we talk about awful, terrible things, but I do want to show you something that's not awful and terrible. My mom really came through on Christmas. She gave me my favorite gift that I maybe have ever gotten. It lights up and it says Eastern Crime Zone on Air. If you're listening on audio, it's just a little box and it says Eastern Crime Zone on Air, like one of those little signs you see at radio stations when they're recording, so everyone knows to shut up because I'm busy. Our house is always quiet so I don't need one of these to let them know I'm recording. But look how precious it is. It's so cute. It's like my favorite gift I've ever gotten. Mom really just like she mom slayed this Christmas, mom slayed, thank you. I think you can tell that I haven't been around people in a while, because when I haven't been around people for a few days, I just get really excited to talk Like I'm just like oh my God, I'm going to combust if I don't say words out of my face right now. So editing this is going to be so much fun because I am absolutely on one. Today, on my Chandler Halderson episode on YouTube, I got a comment letting me know that I got a detail wrong and I absolutely appreciate that it's going to happen. I'm going to get things wrong. I'm a human being. I'm just honestly, I'm a girl with Google who thinks this stuff is fascinating. So I do the research and I put everything in one video, but by no means am I perfect. I am not going to get everything right, and I really appreciate people bringing that to my attention. Now, the thing about that comment that I really wanted to bring up was that this commenter felt like I had embellished the story on purpose, which I did not. I actually find it embarrassing when I get things wrong about a story. I don't prefer that. Obviously I was a little embarrassed when I saw that I had gotten something wrong and I would never purposely make these stories more jarring or more interesting. I think truth is stranger than fiction sometimes, especially when you get to true crime. So I don't feel the need to embellish these stories. And again, no hate to that person. No, I have no ill will with them. They saw something and interpreted it that way that I had intentionally gotten something wrong to try to look a certain way or get views or something. I don't feel the need to do that. I think that these stories are interesting on their own and I was actually quite embarrassed that I got something wrong. But I shouldn't be, because I'm a human being and you're a human being and we all make mistakes, as my dad has been trying to tell me my whole life, because I hate making mistakes. So I'm trying to be graceful about it, but I really just want to like crawl into a hole and die Anyway. So thank you for letting me know when I get things wrong and being respectful about it, because it's never my intention. So, that being said, let's get into today's case, where, hopefully, no one will have to correct me on anything, but we'll see. Today's case is about Blaise Bernstein, and Blaise was a truly exceptional human being, and I'm not just saying that because I'm the girl in front of the camera and it's my job to say, oh, they lit up a room when they walked into it. I know that's like kind of a joke and true crime that people say that all the time. No, I really mean it. Blaise was an exceptional human being. He was creative and talented and curious and he just seems like such an amazing writer. His family refers to him as a Renaissance man. I think his grandfather actually started calling him that and it is so true. He was very talented at just about everything that he tried his hand at, from what it seems. I just have the utmost respect for him and his family. You can just tell when you watch interviews of his parents or videos of him that they are all just very intelligent human beings. They're all very smart, well educated, they're articulate, and I really just admire that about them. It's really connected to Blaise and his family, even though we've never met and I hope that doesn't come across as creepy but I just I feel inexplicably connected to this case and I may feel that way for the rest of my life. I don't know if I'll ever forget Blaise and I hope by the end of this you won't either Because he was truly special. But let's go ahead and dive in and we'll talk about everything and we'll check back in at the end and see if you feel that way too. Blaise's mother and father are both native Californians and attended the University of California, santa Barbara, together, where they met in 1987, and then later got married in Los Angeles in 1992. His father, gideon, went on to become a chartered financial analyst and to manage the portfolio of leisure capital management in Costa Mesa, where he is presently an equity partner. His mother, jeannie Pepper, earned a law degree in 1995 from Pepperdine School of Law. His mom's name is Jeannie Pepper that is the cutest name I've ever heard and she graduated from Pepperdine. Jeannie Pepper went to Pepperdine and picked a law degree. It sounds like a tongue twister, but I just think she is the cutest name in the world and I couldn't get over it the whole time I was researching this case. Blaise Nathan Bernstein's life started in South Orange County on April 27, 1998. And soon after, in the year 2000, jeannie would leave her law practice to devote herself to caring for Blaise and his two younger siblings. His paternal grandmother, leah Bernstein, was a retired language teacher, born in Romania in 1936 and was a Holocaust survivor, and because of this the Bernstein family is very proud of their Jewish heritage. Blaise was named for his grandfathers, but also for the 17th century French polymath, blaise Pascal. The night of Blaise's disappearance, his grandfather, richard Bernstein, asked him what people thought of his name. Blaze said that he was asked about his name all the time, but he didn't remember the story of how he got his name. He was told the meaning of it that night. When the family explained that Blaze Pascal was a French polymathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and theologian who pioneered calculating machines and made numerous contributions to science, he smiled and was humbled by the discussion, and his parents proudly told him that this was his namesake and they expected great things from him. For his high school education, blaze would attend the Orange County School of the Arts or OSHA. This is actually a donation dependent charter school and no student is accepted or denied based on financial capacity. Osha offers pre-professional arts training in a variety of conservatories within the schools applied arts, dance, fine media and arts, music and theater. This innovative public charter school embraces and encourages artistic creativity and academic excellence, producing lifelong learners who matriculate to top-tier colleges, universities and preparatory programs. That was absolutely a mouthful. Basically, this school is like the school that Tori Vega went to in Victorious. It's an art school where they did a bunch of cool stuff cooking, media, dance and they also had their regular school on top of it. So I don't know how they had enough hours in the day, because I just went to a regular school and we did not have enough time for dance and media and music, but it sounds like a really cool school. While in high school, blaze had many extracurricular activities, including working Saturdays at the synagogue as a classroom aid. He also loved participating in the Science Olympiad in the 11th and 12th grade and brought home a first place medal for OSHA in the state challenge with his participation in a chemistry tournament his senior year. The influence of his opinions as a gourmet, cook, writer and community activist became noticeable after he left for college at the University of Pennsylvania in August of 2016, when he began to use his great communication skills as a copy editor for the Penn Review and U-Pens unique foodie magazine, penn Appetite, which again, such a cute name. Everyone has a wonderful name, even the Food Magazine has a great name. In this case, he was elected as the managing editor of Penn Appetite for its next publication. He was also a copy editor for a Penn cookbook, aptly named WISC, which, as far as I know, is still in development. Blaze also became a community activist in October of 2017, where he wrote a letter to the editor of the Daily Pennsylvania in an effort to improve U-Pens safety and reform campus policies. That led to a congenial meeting with U-Pens Vice Provost for University Life, valerie Swain-Cade McCollum, where they spoke about how to make U-Pen a safer and better place for students. In addition to all the other things I mentioned, blaze was also part of the LGBTQ plus community. According to his friend Alex, another one of his OSHA friends, they said quote wasn't a big deal for him. He was like, yeah, I'm gay and that's it. He didn't feel the need to be a part of it. It wasn't a part of him, but it was. It wasn't his identity, yet it was. End quote. You can make your sexuality as a big or a little part of your personalities. You want to. For some people, it's a really big part of their personality and they want to wear the rainbow colors and they want to talk about it and they want to be a part of the community very actively, and that's wonderful. But on the flip side, some people are a little bit more reserved about it. They're like yeah, I'm bisexual, I'm gay, I'm a lesbian, you know, whatever they identify as, and it's just part of their personality and it's not something that they really want to focus on. I think I'm personally a little bit more like blaze. I'm bisexual and for a while, I definitely like, made it a bigger part of my personality, especially when I was going through a phase where I thought I was a lesbian, but I actually do, unfortunately, still like men. So I think I relate to blaze a little bit on this, because I'm bisexual and I don't make it a huge part of my personality. It just is what it is. I date men and women and it's not something I bring up unless it's relevant to the conversation. So maybe that's what his friend meant by that. In June 2017, blaze connected on Tinder with a former classmate named Sam Woodward. The guy blaze had been seeing was moving out of state and blaze was looking for someone to chat with, maybe flirt a little. Blaze recognized Sam from school and he super liked him, and within 30 minutes they matched. Some people think that Sam is attractive and like to mention it in the comment section about this case, and I wholeheartedly disagree. Sam looks like he snuck onto earth. Sam looks like the kind of guy who would hit on you and if you say you're not interested in he, would call you an ugly bitch. Sam looks like one of his molars is definitely rotten. I shouldn't dog the guy's looks. It's not his fault that he looks like that, but I'm just going to say he's the most disgusting human being ever. A few months later, on the evening of January 2, 2018, blaze cooked a day after New Year's Feast for his family, repurposing some of what he'd served the night before. He made a dairy-free macaroni and cheese, and then he reused the butternut squash and made a really good soup and put in the pasta too. Genie and Gideon were really happy to see their son thriving. After graduating, blaze had gotten into the University of Pennsylvania's prestigious Molecular Sciences program, but had taken a semester off to deal with some personal issues. So they were really happy to see him back, living his life and doing really well. Blaze had returned to Penn in the fall of 2017 and had begun to settle in. After they finished dinner that night, genie took blaze's little sister, bo, to a sleepover, and blaze and Sam were chatting on Snapchat until Sam offered to come pick blaze up to hang out for a little bit. It was around 11pm when Sam turned into the Foothill Ranch neighborhood heading towards the Santa Ana Mountains. He stopped at a two-story house on a palm-lined cul-de-sac. Blaze came out wearing a striped t-shirt and sweatpants. He wasn't wearing his glasses and had left his wallet inside. The planet, seemed, was not to go far. Together. They drove back down the hillside to the Foothill Ranch Town Center and they sat there for a while under the orange glow of a hobby lobby marquee. At 11.36pm, blaze texted his friend Lily. The gist of it was you will not believe what's happening right now. Sam says that Blaze told him they were going to go meet someone else from high school, so around midnight they got to Berezio Park, which is only about 10 minutes from Blaze's house. They really were not far from his home at all. But once they were there and talking for a little bit, blaze gets out of the car and walks into the park and Sam waits there for him. I don't know why he doesn't get out of the car and go with him, but he sits in the car and waits for about an hour and when Blaze doesn't come back, sam says tries to message him unsuccessfully on Snapchat a few times and then left around 1 am To go to his girlfriend's house. When Blaze still hadn't responded, around 340 am, sam said that he returned to the park to search for him. That first night blazes family didn't think he was missing. They actually didn't know he had gone out. He didn't say anything. He didn't take his things and because he didn't say anything about going out, they believe he was supposed to be gone a very short amount of time. They didn't get worried until he failed to show up for a dentist appointment in the morning and Blaze was always on time when he didn't show for the dental appointment. Genie called Gideon and they both came home as fast as possible by 10 pm on January 3rd. The Bernsteins were growing increasingly concerned and Bo logged into blazes snapchat to see if she could find any clues and then she texted his friend Lily. Lily asked if there were any unfamiliar Username and told Bo to not open any photos because, like we've talked about in previous cases, snapchat gets rid of things once you open them, so if you open something, it goes away. Bo scanned through blazes account, looking at everyone he messaged with recently, and the name that stood out was Sam Woodward. The family had no idea who this was and they did message him. On Thursday, january 4th, dylan Jansen, a Sheriff's investigator on the case, was in Berazio Park trying to get the lay of the land when he noticed Sam Woodward was walking by and they got to talking. Sam told Jansen about the meeting with Blaze and at one point he confessed that Blaze had kissed him and that Sam got Really upset about this and Blaze apologized. Sam told the officer he found homosexuality Disgusting but that at the same time, the idea of being with another man was something of interest to him. He walked Jansen along the route he said he'd taken as he looked for Blaze. In the early morning hours when they were interviewing Sam, they noticed that he had several small scratches and abrasions on his hands and when asked about these, sam said that it was from a fight club. He was involved in Just a casual fight club, you know which? I think the first rule is you're not supposed to talk about it. So, like Detectives also noticed that he had dirt under his fingernails and when asked about this, he said he fell into a dirt puddle. And affidavit said that he was nervous, breathing heavy, talking fast and visibly shaking. Sam agreed to an interview at the sheriff's headquarters in Santa Anna and now, where an affidavit says his story stayed fairly consistent, though he told detectives he couldn't remember the last name of the girlfriend he said he visited after blazes disappearance and had no idea where she lived. Kind of seems like she went to a different school. Oh, you don't know her. She went. Goes to a different school again. Yeah, she doesn't exist, bro. Okay, while leaving the sheriff's headquarters, he pulled out his jacket over his hand, kind of like this if you're on YouTube so that his hand and fingers wouldn't touch any of the doors that he was opening. So I'm not sure if that's like for fingerprints sake, I'm sure it was, but it was just kind of weird like he did one of these to open the doors. Sunday, sam took communion at our Lady Queen of Angels Catholic Church. During this time, while police search for blaze, his family is absolutely Devastated by his disappearance. They know that he did not walk away from his life the way that Sam says he did. It's not in his character to get out of a random car and walk into a park and never return. Here's what his mom had to say about that.

I His mother, Jeannie Bernstein, says Blaze is a planner and would never just wander off alone. It's inexplicable, Honestly. This is not a kid that just wanders off into the dark. He's a planner, he's meticulous, he's brilliant, he's a chemist. Someone like that doesn't just run off into the dark. She says the family had a wonderful dinner altogether Tuesday. Blaze went out sometime later that night with a friend. The friend told his parents he last saw Blaze walking into Borrego Park towards the Whiting Ranch Wilderness area. Blaze's parents say the friend told them he didn't know why Blaze wanted to go there. They didn't know he had gone out until the next day when he didn't show up for a dental appointment From the minute he didn't show up for that dental appointment.

I knew something was really, really wrong and I need to give comfort and hope to everybody around me.

On January 10th 2018, a cold front moved in bringing much needed rain to Southern California. The rain washed away mud from a shallow grave dug in Borrego Park, revealing Blaze's body. During the autopsy, it was found that he had been stabbed 19 times in the neck, 14 times on the left and 5 on the right. His face was also injured and he'd been stabbed on his left knee. A search warrant was served on the home Sam lived in and inside they found a lot of evidence. Forensic scientist Corey McGay testified that blood stains on the blade of a knife found in Sam's bedroom, on the visor of his car and under his watch matched Blaze's genetic material. She said the chances of the blood belonging to someone else were one in a trillion. What I understood from under his watch, what that meant was on the backside of the face of his watch. So you would wear your watch like this and then you flip it over and on the back there's probably blood there. That's what I think that meant. I don't think they meant like on the back of it as in on Sam's skin. I think that they meant on the back of the watch somewhere, as the police looked more and more into Sam and who he has as a person. They were pretty shocked at some of the shit he was involved in. Sam Woodward was an avowed neo-Nazi and a member of Adam Waffen Division, one of the country's most notorious extremist groups. Southern Poverty Law Center defines the Adam Waffen Division as a series of terror cells that work towards civilizational collapse. Its members, who can be fairly described as accelerationists, believe that violence, depravity and degeneracy are the only sure way to establish order in their dystopian and apocalyptic version of the world. This organization formed out of Iron March, an influential fascist forum that went offline in the fall of 2017. The group's propaganda makes it clear that Adam Waffen, which means nuclear weapons roughly in German, embraces third-right ideology and preaches hatred of minorities, gays and Jews. Adam Waffen produces YouTube videos showing members firing weapons and is filmed members burning the US Constitution and setting fire to the American flag, but the organization by and large cloaks its operation in secrecy and bars members from speaking to the media. Members have discussed using explosives to cripple public water systems, destroy parts of the electrical power grid, and one member even claimed to have obtained classified maps of the power grid in California. Adam Waffen members praise Timothy McVeigh, the former soldier who bombed the Alfred P Murray Federal Building in Oklahoma City on 1995, killing 168 people, including numerous children. They praise the Charleston church shooter, dylan Roof, and Anders Breivik, the Norwegian extremist who massacred 77 people. To understand how Sam got into this group, let's go back in time to his years at OSHA, before he transferred out his sophomore year. The rumors that Sam Woodward was interested in boys had been passed around at Orange County School of the Arts. A classmate my sources referred to as Jared told his friends that Sam had made a pass at him. Sam didn't talk to Jared about his sexuality in school but one day he sent him a message. Jared said Sam was inquiring a lot in terms of my identity and wanted to know more. And that really surprised me because of how homophobic he was and because of all the opposed beliefs he had to my own. Jared had been openly gay since the sixth grade. Sam continued to send Jared sexually charged messages and when Sam finally asked to meet up in person, jared declined. Jared cut off all communication with Sam in the tenth grade and was very uncomfortable how things had escalated. They never texted again but Jared had shown some of these messages to Blaze and another classmate without Sam's knowledge. So this sort of puts it into context why Blaze would have been texting his friend Lily that night that he was meeting up with Sam. That you won't believe what's going on because of the rumors that Sam had been interested in men and how homophobic Sam was in high school. It's one of those things that when someone's really homophobic, it's what are they hiding? Is there something about yourself that you maybe don't like and that's why you're going so hard at this right now? So Osha was a very liberal school. It's for the arts. When you have a lot of artistic people, they do tend to lean towards the liberal side, and Sam was a conservative from a devout Catholic family, so he kind of didn't fit in. In a lot of ways. He cultivated an aggressive, macho persona and seemed to relish in upsetting other people. In graphic design class he showed off a Confederate flag that he had drawn and he also posted a lot in front of Confederate flags. I'll put up oh, it'll be on this side. I'll put up a thing here. In this picture the caption says most of you don't know this, but this flag represents Southern pride, not racism. Anyway, happy Independence Day, which is two things. One you're from California, sam is from California so like why are you representing Southern pride at all? First of all, you're not Southern, you're from California. Two, the Confederate flag is racist. And here's, I see you typing, I see you typing. I see you about to come at me with some incorrect facts. Let me point out people love to say that, oh, it doesn't represent racism. Blah, blah, blah, blah. No, the Confederate flag does represent racism and I'm so tired of people saying that it doesn't. It's not heritage or whatever the fuck people want to say. It's literally racism. In his cornerstone speech of 1861, then vice president of the Confederacy, alexander H Stevens said the Confederacy was founded on the principle that, quote the Negro is not equal to the white man and that slavery, subordination to the superior race in his natural and normal condition end quote that is not heritage, that is white supremacy. Okay, for a music project. In school, sam chose Johnny Cash's cover of Nine Inch Nails Hurt as an ode to self-destruction. He didn't seem to have any friends or try to make any. One of his classmates said if there was going to be a shooting he would be the guy. In the years after OSHA, sam reinvented himself. He graduated from Corona Del Mar High School and became an Eagle Scout, but he increasingly lived on the internet. Sam was chronically online. He was interested in politics and created a lot of online accounts as he would later tell a friend, a confused conservative libertarian and he hung out on the photo-sharing app called iFunny, where his username was Saboteur. Sam made a few friends on this app, including someone named Cruz. I think this is actually a nickname, kind of like Saboteur was for Sam. I don't think Cruz is their real name. It's not clear when they met, but by early 2017, both of them were communicating in Skype chats operated by the extremist group now known as Vanguard America, which would gain notoriety when a man who had marched with it drove his car into a crowd in Charlottesville, virginia, killing Heather Haier. By then, sam and Cruz had become dissatisfied with Vanguard because they didn't think it was radical enough. Cruz found Adam Waffen on Twitter, which the group's leader, brandon Russell, used to promote a book called Siege, written in the 80s by a Nazi named James Mason. He encouraged readers to leave society behind and fight for its destruction. Mason was a fan of Charles Manson and encouraged isolated acts of violence or lone wolfing as Adam Waffen called it by small cells independent of one another and any national leadership In Adam Waffen, the life-changing experience of reading the book. Siege was known as Siege Pilling. Sam had grown up in the coastal town of Newport Beach, only half an hour from Blaise's family and his parents…. Sam had grown up in the coastal town of Newport Beach, only half an hour from Blaise's family. His parents attended Our Lady, queen of Angels every day, according to a priest at the church, and their names are inscribed on a monument to donors outside the building. As Sam drifted deeper into the far right, he'd grown to resent aspects of his parents' faith. Once he sent his friend Patrick a topless Snapchat photo of himself looking upset, the caption said your Christian father calls people who actively deny Christ as their savior God's chosen people. The caption read. But Sam still loved his father and hoped one day he'd join him in white nationalism. He believed he was getting chipped away at bit by bit. Sam spent the summer of 2017 with crews in Texas. Sam and crews roamed the state in Cruises, truck hopping from motel to homeless shelter, always on the lookout for a construction job. In July, they went to meet James Mason in Colorado, and James Mason is like a giant piece of shit, and I could do a whole episode about him and his teachings, but I want to at least mention that Sam actually met this guy and spent time in person with him. I think that him meeting James Mason in person really signifies that this wasn't going to change for him anymore. He met this guy in person and he was fascinated by him. He really looked up to him. I do also want to mention that James Mason hates the government and socialism, but he relies on government housing and soup kitchens to stay fed in Denver, colorado. Logic is nowhere in this episode and he's a pedophile. So I just think it's interesting that you hate the government, but without it you'd be homeless. Later, when Mason is asked about Sam and what Sam may have done to Blaze because he has not been convicted yet, he remembered Sam as a fine, upstanding young man and when asked what he would say if he could talk to Sam right now, he said I wish you would run this past me first. You wouldn't be sitting here today, but all good luck. When asked about political violence, he said I don't advocate doing these things, but if you're going to do it, for God's sake make it worthwhile. I just think it's really interesting that this guy has so much shit to say. Like it's always the people who are doing nothing with their lives who have the most fucking opinions. Like you know who has a lot of ideas and plenty of time to talk about them. Fucking losers who don't contribute to the society that they leech from and bitch about. Like it's really convenient of you to hate the society that provides you with your housing and your food when you yourself cannot provide those things. I'm definitely going to have some like really angry neo-Nazis in my fucking comment section. That's like wild. I can't wait for it. It's engagements, engagement babes. Leave that hate comment. By the fall of 2017, sam had returned to his parents' home in Newport Beach, where he took a construction job that paid well and made him feel good. In an Adam Waffen chat, he said Cruz is right, you spend time among real men, being a real man. That fall, cruz moved to Southern California where he took charge of a regional Adam Waffen chapter and Sam was his right hand man. Sam was still hoping to drop out of the system and buy farming materials so that he could kind of live off the grid, so he took a job setting up bounce houses and nerf battles for kids' parties. Sam was keeping a diary around. This time Excerpts would end up being read in court and some of the entries were about sodomites. He met on Tinder and Grindr. He would get on these apps and pretend to be interested in these men just long enough to think it was funny, and then he would pull the rung out from under them and be like actually, you are an F word and I'm straight and I'm better than you, and here's a video of a gay dude getting the shit beat out of him. That's what he would do. That's something he would talk about doing often. Sorry, I look different. I finished filming, started editing and then decided that I wanted to come back and say a couple things a different way. So, with all that being said about him luring men in from Grindr and Tinder just to mess with them or prank them, I think that that provides a very clear motive here that he was on Tinder not to meet Blaze and get to know him and date him or even just have a fling with him. He was on there maliciously to find a victim. He was hunting, in a way. A lot of other people think that maybe he really was confused about his sexuality and that he snapped? I personally Don't think so, and if he was confused about a sexuality that was not at the forefront of his mind when he committed this crime allegedly since he has not been convicted yet I think that this was calculated, that he had planned all this out. I don't think this was a situation where he was trying to explore sexuality and then he snapped. I've seen that going around on the internet and I don't think that that's a bad theory per se. I just personally think that this was calculated. After Blaze's body was found, members of Adam often were celebrating. They celebrated Sam and his deeds and they ended up putting his face on shirts and posting all over the place. And now it's almost like a trend. If there's a video about Blaze or something about his murder or about Sam, a lot of these members will go into the comments and comment things like Sab, are you going to finish those ranks? And, of course, saboteur was Sam's name on iFunny that he used. From what I understand, he was in the middle of ranking something like ranking, like pictures people had sent him before he was arrested and then he didn't finish the ranks because he got arrested. So people will go and comment that on YouTube videos or Facebook posts, from what I've seen. And then people also say really awful things about Blaze just falling on a knife 19 times and that Sam was only trying to save him, which is obviously a joke, and it's a sick joke and you know that's probably going to come up in this comment section Maybe not right away, but eventually there'll be a couple and I'm just going to ignore those people because they really need to get a life. I just can't imagine how it would feel to know that my child is no longer with us and then to know that people were celebrating that. I can't imagine how his family feels, but they are stronger than I am. His family is full of very strong, strong people, and so they have created Blaze it Forward, which is basically just this. There's Facebook page, there's a website about it and everything. It's a movement trying to get people to share random acts of kindness, and I am going to play a clip that I found online that I think really just puts it all out there in a really nice way.

Thank you. Blaze Bernstein's parents chose to spend this Martin Luther King Day doing good for the community. The last MLK day was their son's memorial service. 150 people joined Genie and Gideon Bernstein at the second Harvest Food Bank in Irvine Bagging Apples. I'm the executive tire. And what is your secret? We don't think Thai fast. A movement was formed after the 19 year old's death. It's known as Blaze it Forward. There was a room full giving back here today.

Because our son was buried last year in Martin Luther King Day and we wanted to make this a tradition that we do something positive, we get smiles on other people's faces and help to make the world a better place.

Knowing today would be painful. The Bernstein's organized this day of service and put out the call. Every single slot was filled.

It's so incredible because so many people together create so much more than just one person doing it, and it's so cool that so many people are willing to do that.

Blaze it Forward is just such a beautiful way to remember Blaze and everything that he stood for. If you can just go out and do a random act of kindness for someone it doesn't have to be anything big and just think about Blaze this week, I think that that's definitely something doable for everyone. It can be someone you know, someone you don't know. Just doing something nice and thinking about Blaze, I think, would go a long way, especially if his family knew that you were thinking about him. I will say last thing. His mom also has a YouTube channel called Pep Talks, and I'm going to link that below as well because I could listen to her talk about just about everything, because I think she's a really cool lady. I'm not going to lie, I think his mom's really cool. But that is all I have for you today on this case. Hopefully it goes to trial so we can get some more details soon. Everything I've compiled is just from different YouTube videos and different articles, so some of the facts are a little blurry and I really just want to get everything, especially on their phones. If we could have some of that Snapchat conversation, I'm not sure how all of that works, especially since Snapchat is a platform that deletes things. I would love to see what their conversation looked like, especially the initial conversation on Tinder. If we could see that it would provide so much clarity. So I'm sure it'll all come out if and when there's a trial and we can get more details and we can do an update. But until then, everyone just remember to blaze it forward and I will see you very soon with another case. Until then, stay safe and remember to question everything. Bye.