How did a boy I babysat become a man who murdered?

The costs of Catholicism, conservatism, and class.

Listen to the post read by Jo. or read below. This piece discusses incest abuse. If you’re a survivor or supporter seeking resources, head over to Incest AWARE or Sibling Sexual Trauma.

My mother drove me to the home of the Woodward family for the very first time years ago in Newport Beach, CA, the perfect city by the sea, when I was nearly a teen for a babysitting gig. “Be sure to wash the dishes before Blake and Michele come home,” she reminded me from the driver’s seat. I nodded my head in compliance, stepped out of the vehicle, and walked to the front door of the family who I knew from the Catholic parish just down the street from my childhood home in a neighborhood called Eastbluff, also known as “The Catholic Ghetto.” 

Michele, long, lean, and lovely, welcomed me in, “Hello, Annie!” Blake, her husband, who presented shyly also greeted me, while their two boys, Sam and Clay, raced down the hallway. Clay, two years older than Sam, had brown straight hair cut into a bowl shape around his head and constellations of freckles that spotted his skin. Sam, likely around two or three years old at the time, toddled toward me with his bright blond hair, a smile that stretched wide across his face, and a body still plump with pudge. I scooped him up and felt excited to get paid to spend the next few hours with these two sweet boys.

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Michele reviewed the kids’ dinner menu, bedtime routines, as well as interests with me, then walked out the door with her husband. As far as I remember, the evening passed easily, while the boys and I played games, ate dinner, and prepared for sleep by putting on pajamas and brushing teeth. I washed the dishes, just as my mother had said, then tucked Clay in and guided Sam to bed. 

I supposed Sam was sleeping, while I waited for Michele and Blake to return home. But clearly, he knew how to play pretend because as soon as his parents strode back in, Sam raced out of his bedroom, ran back down the same hall, and jumped into his mother’s arms. “He’s always been a bit afraid of the dark,” she said. Then, Blake drove me back to my childhood home on Bunya St. in the Catholic Ghetto.

“Were there signs? Did you know back then? ”

A friend immediately asked me when I told him that Sam Woodward, the same boy who couldn’t sleep until his parents returned home, had become a 20-year-old man who murdered a companion. Blaze Bernstein. Jewish and gay, a cook and an activist, a son and a brother, a writer and a friend, at only 19 years old Blaze’s life came to a violent end. Sam stabbed him 28 times in the face and neck, dug a hole in the ground with his bare hands, buried Blaze’s body in a shallow grave in a park, then pretended to be a friend by joining the week-long search party. When the rain came, Blaze’s body resurfaced from the earth demanding accountability and justice. 

“No, I had no idea,” I responded to my friend. Back then, the Woodward’s presented as all of the families did publicly in Newport Beach: just perfectly. Kind, well-dressed, and involved in the church parish, no one suspected that a kid from a family in a well-off community would grow into a man who brutally killed a friend. 

What happened between the day I babysat Sam to the night of January 2, 2018, when that little boy I knew, then 20, chose to kill Blaze Bernstein, remains a mystery to me. My heart grieves for the violent and unnecessary loss of a life of a boy I didn’t know, while my mind also wonders about Sam, the one I once did. 

How did the little boy I sang to sleep at night, the one I knew to be blonde with big cheeks, a beautiful smile and so sweet, grow up to be a man who murdered? 

On one side, the prosecutors call Sam a perpetrator. They blame his conservative political and social views like homophobia and anti-semitism that prove Sam’s crime was a murder motivated by hate. Investigators came to this conclusion after uncovering the information that the little boy I knew bullied other gay kids in his classroom, catfished homosexual men online to out them, and spent time in training with Vanguard America then the Atomwaffen Division: both alt-right, Neo-Nazi factions infamous for homophobic and anti-semitic beliefs and behaviors. 

On the other side, the defense calls Sam a victim. Sam’s conservative Catholic upbringing, his aggressive behavior from autism that went untreated until he was 18, his recent diagnosis of Obsessive Compulsive [Condition] (OCD), his lack of safe sexual exploration in a homophobic family environment, and his social isolation, all contributed to a level of vulnerability that made Sam a target to recruiters who groomed kids into alt-right factions. 

Both sides call Sam a murderer. The trial does not question if Sam killed Blaze, but instead seeks to answer whether or not the crime had been premeditated and motivated by anti-gay and anti-semitic sentiments. The consequence for murder in Orange County law is 25 years to life in prison, while murder as a hate crime guarantees a life sentence. 

But what’s Sam’s story within the seemingly perfect city of Newport Beach?

Sam claims that rage motivated him, "The anger I never felt in my whole life.”

In an account of Sam’s testimony published in a piece by Paul Anderson at Fox 11, Sam disclosed that he was a victim of sexual groping by Blaze, who allegedly photographed or videotaped Sam’s privates without permission, while he rested in a marijuana-induced stupor, then potentially texted the photos to friends. 

"I snapped open and I literally looked right next to myself. I saw a hand on my crotch with my pants unbuckled," Sam began. "I looked right up and (Blaze) had his phone in his hand. […] His hand was in the innermost area of my thigh." Sam continued to testify.

"I thought he might photograph me, send text messages, I thought he might record me. [...] Everything was a blur," Sam expressed. "I remember talking to [Blaze], using a voice I shouldn't have, yelling at the top of my lungs [...] I tried getting up, I tried reaching for the phone. I tried grabbing it [...] Push came to shove I couldn't control myself. I lost it. I didn't even know what to think. I was disgusted. I was enraged."

Sam explained that Blaze responded by saying "calm down [...] or it's not a big deal. [...] All I remember is him telling me something that sounded like ‘It's already done,’ and ‘I got you, I got you, you (expletive) hypocrite.’ [...] I maybe heard him use the word ‘outed.’" 

According to the record, Sam often carried a pocket knife in his pants. "I found one of the knives. [...] I couldn't even see what was going on and at that point [...] The phone wasn't even in the light anymore. Nothing was in the light anymore. I just kept driving and driving the knife down. During that time and the ensuing tumble I just never felt nothing other than being clawed and bitten." 

Anderson claims that when asked what Sam feared in that moment of “mortal terror,” Sam expressed that “he was frightened of the reaction he would receive from his family and community if they found out.”

"Just thinking of the look on (my father's) face [...] I couldn't fathom that." Sam confirmed.

When Michele, Sam’s mother testified, she reasoned that her husband, who had been verbally abusive to Sam, was homophobic due to his experience at 16 years old with Child Sexual Abuse (CSA). When Blake, Sam’s father testified, he validated that as a Catholic he believed that homosexuality was a sin, and also that his sons would often have fist fights as they grew older. 

Were the dysfunctions in this family system solely to blame for so much rage in a white boy raised in a well-off home in a community by the sea?

This is where my own lived experience may help to bring some clarity. Looking back at Sam and I’s upbringing through a lens of liberation, his story — although never justified — makes more sense to me. I don’t know what happened in Sam’s life between the day I left my own family, the Catholic Church, and Newport Beach for the last time, to the night Sam murdered Blaze in a park near a hillside. What I do know is that regardless of the differences between Sam’s upbringing and mine, I don’t have a criminal record.

As an incest or intrafamilial child sexual abuse (ICSA) survivor and community organizer, I know that rape does not make people homophobic. 

As a neurodivergent person, I know that undiagnosed autism doesn’t make people murderers. 

As a confused queer person, I know that the lack of safe sexual exploration in a heteronormative social context doesn’t make people kill others.

No, Sam’s father’s homophobia is not to be blamed on his experience with CSA.

No, Sam’s neurodivergences are not to be blamed for his crime. 

No, Sam’s sexual need to explore in a safe space is not to be blamed for the murder of his gay friend.

So, then what or who are to blame?

Sam’s rage I can deeply relate to. I didn’t get the chance to watch Sam become a man because I left Newport Beach at 18 to attend college the first time then again at 23 for graduate school and never returned. Sam, likely 10 years younger than me then, would have been just entering his teens. 

Newport Beach promised Eden, a paradise with its manicured lawns, and exquisite malls, and made up people, and sparkling seasides lapping the easily accessible shoreline. The culture of this perfect place where Sam and I were both raised was as homogenous as the weather and monochromatic as the blue in the sea. Everyone was expected to be exactly the same everyday: white, wealthy, self-sufficient, pleasant, heteronormative, and neurotypical. Uniformity, the expectation. While those of us who couldn’t keep up or fit in were called names like sick or crazy, insane or lazy. 

Then the Catholic parish down the street promised Eden for all of eternity, if you followed the Sacraments, as well as god’s “natural law,” or so they called it. Apparently the creator of diversity wanted rigid identities mapped onto binary sex categories and gender roles predetermined for boys and girls, men and women, including heterosexuality.

Then like Adam and Eve, those two genders were to partner and have children, masking genderism and homophobic oppression under the guise of tradition. Anyone who didn’t or couldn’t fulfill these expectations were called names like sinful, or isolated or excommunicated from the community and ensured eternal damnation. I accepted this worldview as objective, and did my best to fit in, while always feeling a deep, intuitive need to be relieved of this version of reality.

When I left home at 18 to attend college, instantly my body began shaking. Dreams of being raped haunted me nightly. I sprinted across campus as soon as the day darkened to decrease vulnerability of sexual violence. I avoided the social scene where I felt more sensitive to the sexism so present at college parties. By 20, I could hardly function: the weight of undiagnosed depression, anxiety, fatigue, and digestive stress nearly took my life away from me. This is when I began to wonder if I were going crazy and why.

Doctors said after a number of tests that nothing was structurally wrong with me. When I reviewed my life’s history for trauma, I recalled the stories my mother passed down to me: the surgery on my six-month old body that removed a large section of my colon due to Hirschbrung’s Disease, as well as the grand mal seizures that happened repeatedly until I was five. But physicians at the time had no reason to believe that these temporary childhood illnesses could cause such a debilitating introduction to adult life. 

Otherwise, I grew up in what I knew to be a nice Catholic family with enough means to always have what I needed, plus a number of luxuries and participated in a variety of activities like sports, plays, and social outings. When I moved away and told people I grew up in Newport Beach, the setting for the popular show at the time The OC, they glorified my upbringing as the ideal place to be, or the city they one day aspired to live in, or expressed such envy. 

My history had been celebrated both by those who had arrived into the community of Newport Beach and could sustain the level of wealth to raise their nuclear families, but also by a society that centered the white and wealthy communities that lived near the sea as the fulfillment of the American Dream. Apparently, nothing in my story could be considered traumatizing enough to cause such strong psychosomatic symptoms in my body. 

So, it must’ve been me, it must’ve been all inside my head. 

However, as I began to recount more specific events of my youth to friends and therapists, mentors and colleagues, they looked at me with surprise at best and horror at worst. Or they questioned the reality I had normalized and internalized as objective and offered alternative worldviews.  

“My father groped my mother sexually in front of me.”

“My grandfather felt up the breasts of mannequins in store windows.”

“My great grandfather verbally accosted women in public and my family laughed.”

Boys will be boys, right? 

This hypersexualization, passed down from generation to generation, had been justified as normal male behavior in my family system. But these acts directly juxtaposed with what I learned at Our Lady Queen of Angels Catholic Church on Sunday just down the street from my house up the hill in the Catholic Ghetto. The neighborhood with five or six-bedroom homes was given this derogatory name because it couldn’t compete with the mansions on the sea cliffs. 

The tenth and final commandment passed from god to Moses as he liberated the Israelites from slavery says, “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”

Jesus Christ confirmed this teaching when saying, “You have heard that it was said, 'Do not commit Adultery,' but I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” However, my family taught me that my body could not be divorced from a man’s sexuality. So my actions, my appearance, my aesthetic all contributed to — in fact were to blame — for a man’s sexual sinfulness. 

It was my mother’s fault that my father groped her.

It was the mannequins' fault that my grandfather felt them up.

It was the women on the streets’ fault for my grandfather's criticisms or catcalls.

Then at 24 years old, memories returned to me of childhood incest abuse by a number of men in my family, corroborated by the experiences of others. When I disclosed the instances of incest, individuals reacted in different ways:

“You should forgive,” one said.

“Your story just doesn’t add up,” another claimed.

“Do you mean he emotionally raped you?” Questioned someone else.

As I continued to distance myself from my family system to seek safety, they blamed me for the shame my absence brought onto my seemingly perfect family in Newport Beach. Suddenly, the intergenerational lies had been publicized and they could no longer hide behind a beautiful house near the sea, and crisp clothing, and their sanctity as active members in the Catholic community — whose silence and lack of care for me after disclosure could be interpreted as complicity. 

Yes, I always desired to belong in this competitive community of my upbringing with the Jones’ and the ones always trying to keep up with them. Yes, I needed more support as someone who self-harmed and focused so much on achievement and perfection, fitting in and being normative when my existence reflected the complexities of humanity. But more so, what I sought was ideological consistency. The end of duplicity. The death of hypocrisy. As an undiagnosed neurodivergent person, the world needed to make sense to me. Without a clear and constant construct of reality not based entirely on performativity, my mind began to unwind.

How could I process that my provider by day sexually perpetrated me at night, then went to church on Sundays? 

How could I experience comfort in a family that always masked behind perfection, then behind closed doors revealed their inconsistencies? 

How could I trust the integrity of my community when the ideals preached were so much higher than could be reached, that individuals either accepted their hypocrisies or felt deep shame, or both? 

How could I feel safe in a spirituality that offered me eternal salvation if I abided by the laws of god’s social and sexual creation, and damnation into firing flames if I didn’t, more importantly, if I couldn’t? 

How could I know the truth of oppression throughout my upbringing in a society that always reflected back to me the celebration of perfection that was the city of Newport Beach?

How could I ever love my brain, my body, and my being if I couldn’t keep up with that crap?

In this conservative and objective Catholic upbringing of whiteness and wealth, hetero and neuronormativity, my elders did not teach me critical thinking. The options for alternative ways of believing and being didn’t exist. So although I had some somatic urgings that suggested something was off in this community and often desired to be free of it, I had no paradigms to make sense of my story or language to describe it. Eventually, the constant duplicity and hypocrisy came at a great cost to my mental, physical, and spiritual well-being. 

Rage consumed me in a worldview built on performativity. My parts compartmentalized to survive this inauthentic captivity, the anger of authenticity internalizing so deeply within my body. I found ways for rage release back at myself by picking and scratching at my skin, developing an unshakable self-hatred, clinging to the belief I was worthy of being raped, and neglected, and abandoned by everyone in my fake community that promised Eden and left me with the consequences of someone else’s sins. 

When I left my family, I strove for a community who presented in unity: who lived what they preached. First, I sought for them in traditional Catholic circles, then in progressive activist communities, then I tried to create my own collective of people perfectly aligned to their own ideologies. Until I realized the impossibility of perfection, and accepted the magnificent mess of life with people who do their best, and apologize when they have wronged, and communicate when they have been wronged.

Through decades of therapy and community support, eventually I was diagnosed with Complex-Trauma, and brain damage due to the seizures, and OCD, and found treatments like medication that helped settle me. Over time, I learned to observe my own brain as I existed to better comprehend the sources of its obsessions and rages, so that I did not give into them. I feel less symptomatic the more I set strong boundaries with those who can’t hold my complexities, as well as surround myself with values-aligned activists who seek to eradicate normativity, while celebrating racial diversity, neurodivergence, dis/ability, as well as queer identity and lifestyles. 

My psychological need for ideological clarity and constancy was replaced by the acceptance of the beautiful chaos of creation and my ability to arise and say yes to it daily. Now, I live in New York City, where normativity and uniformity are hard to find. Like Eve, I took a bite out of that Big Apple attached to the Tree of Knowledge by pursuing an education apart from my family, and community, and church’s indoctrinations, and found liberation from the garden of patriarchal perfection written by cis-gendered, able, and heteronormative white supremacists. But my journey to freedom was anything but simple.

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Like Sam, I tried to leave Newport Beach after college, but my mental health conditions landed me right back onto my parent’s couch. Finally, due to a full tuition scholarship to a graduate program, I got out and never went back. I knew I could stay in that home, in that city, in that community that was so celebrated by society as the ideal place to be. Or I could be safe as a queer, neurodivergent, and disabled person in another place. I could be me or be with the community of my upbringing, but not both.

Like me, I read that Sam tried to leave Newport Beach seeking ideological consistency. He, in extreme alt-right communities. We were both left disillusioned. His mental health conditions also landed him right back in his childhood bedroom, where I once sang him to pretend sleep, across the hallway from his homophobic father and a mother who misplaced blame of her husband’s hate on a history of CSA. Today my body aches, as I imagine how Sam felt as a little boy who may have needed extra support and a more diverse community not so obsessed with racial and class, sexual and neurotypical normativity. One of the most painful parts of my liberation journey was accepting that in order to be free, I left so many like me behind.

It sounds as if, at least that one night, Sam’s rage released into the body of Blaze Bernstein 28 times until he died. Make no mistake, Sam is responsible for the death of Blaze, as he let a young life go to waste. He must be held accountable for this choice that he cannot reconcile. But it also seems like such a waste to hold Sam solely accountable for the loss of this life, when he was raised so unsafe in a city, and a church, and a family, and a society that still celebrates the bounty of white supremacy, the objectivity of Christian ideology, the illusion of neuronormativity, the oppression of homosexuality, and the idealism of the nuclear family. 

How could Sam be expected to become a safe man, when the boy I knew was raised in a system of oppression masked under the illusion of perfection?

Sam is accountable for his actions, and we are too. 

The family, who hides the acute needs of their children and obvious signs of domestic violence behind closed doors to appear to be normal, is also responsible. 

The Catholic and conservative homophobia, that continues to be passed down between families that claim to love Jesus, who said nothing about homosexuality, or the outdated and oppressive status quo, are also responsible. 

The culture, that’s so obsessed with normativity that anyone who reflects the diversity of biology is marginalized, is also responsible.

The society, that celebrates and centers the spoils of white supremacy and wealth instead of equity, is also responsible.

The criminal punishment system — one that will cage barely-a-man and call it justice, while leaving the harms and sins of his upbringing, family, community, church, and society free to harm the next generation of children — is also responsible. 

As a queer, neurodivergent, disabled, ICSA survivor, who had the privilege to liberate myself from the oppressive community of the conservative Catholic Ghetto in Newport Beach, I ask that together we create higher standards of social, religious, psychological, and physical diversity in our families, communities, churches, and societies. So that children like Sam and me can be raised to understand the constancy of safety, and to be given the opportunity to exist in all our beautiful complexities.  

Sam wasted a life, but the rest of his life need not be wasted behind the bars of a privatized and violent carceral system. We as his community must work together to transform ourselves, each other, as well as the criminal punishment system into one of transformation, so that this now 26-year-old man, who I babysat as a boy of two or three, can learn far too late what it feels like to be safe and free, committed to values of social equity. And so the boys like Blaze can live well into their nineties, as he should have done, as he should be.

Thank you to Dr. Ethan Levine and Transformative Justice researcher, Lucy Prout, MCJ, for providing editorial reviews for the piece.

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