Five years later, a gay Jewish student's alleged killer is going to trial

The suspect in the 2018 murder of Blaze Bernstein, a Jewish and gay college student, will be in court Friday for the first time since a California judge ruled him competent to stand trial.

Bernstein’s family hopes the pretrial hearing marks the beginning of the end of their wait for justice in a case that prosecutors will present as a crime of homophobia.

A University of Pennsylvania sophomore home for winter break, Bernstein, 19, was stabbed to death and buried in an Orange County park. His alleged killer, a high school classmate named Samuel Woodward, now 25, was active in a local neo-Nazi group, the Atomwaffen Division, at the time of the murder.

The trial, in Orange County Superior Court, has been delayed several times because the original lead prosecutor was appointed to a judgeship and Woodward has cycled through legal representation. He’s now on his third public defender. Experts say that murder trials on the state level can often take years to go to trial.

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