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Bla1 Bernstein was a brilliant 19-year-old college student at the University of Pennsylvania who'd come
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home here to Orange County for winter break when he was brutally stabbed to death at a park near his home. The man
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accused of his murder was a guy named Sam Woodward who Bla1 Bernstein had gone to high school with. Sam also had ties
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to a neo-Nazi group. And prosecutors said that Sam killed Blae because Blae was Jewish and gay. We first met
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Blaise's parents, Gideon and Jeanie, shortly after Blae was killed in 2018. >> And the first time I saw him and I
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looked in his eyes, there's something about this baby. He's he's going to change the world someday.
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>> What do you miss most about Blaze? >> Yeah, that's it. >> His quirky personality.
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>> He was different. >> You like to turn the ordinary into the extraordinary. >> I call him the unicorn. He was
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magnificently creative. >> There's Sam Woodward at trial looking very different than he did when Blae was
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killed. The case finally went to trial in 2024. So, it took 6 years for Gideon and Jeanie to see justice for their son.
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6 years during which hate crimes in the US continued to rise. But what's remarkable about this is that almost
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from the moment that they learned their son was killed, Jeanie and Gideon decided to fight hate with love. They
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started a Blaze Itit Forward Foundation and it encourages acts of kindness in the face of all the ugliness in the
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world. It's a wonderful tribute to Blae. Still, the Bernsteeen wanted to see justice for their son and they were
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ready for that trial. [Applause]