SANTA ANA, Calif. — An Orange County jury convicted Samuel Woodward of first-degree murder Wednesday in the stabbing death of his gay high school classmate.

During the three-month trial, both sides portrayed the 26-year-old Woodward as a young man who struggled with his sexuality growing up in a conservative Newport Beach family, with a particularly disapproving father.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Jennifer Walker told the jury that when Woodward decided to kill Blaze Bernstein, his former classmate, in January 2018, he chose a weapon with symbolic significance: a knife with his father’s name etched on it.

“Who better to prove to that you’re not gay than this homophobic father?” Walker said during closing arguments. “‘I’m not gay, look what I just did.’”

Jurors began deliberating Woodward’s fate Tuesday afternoon and came back with their verdict a day later. They also convicted Woodward of a hate-crime enhancement, which applied to only to Bernstein’s sexual orientation, though he was both Jewish and gay.

Woodward faces life in prison.

Woodward’s attorney, Assistant Public Defender Ken Morrison, acknowledged that his client was guilty of stabbing Bernstein 28 times in a Lake Forest park, which he called a “hideous crime,” but said it was voluntary manslaughter, not murder.

“There’s no premeditation or deliberation,” he told jurors, arguing that Bernstein had provoked Woodward. He said the killing had no connection to his client’s interest in the Atomwaffen Division, an extremist group whose anti-gay, anti-Jewish propaganda was found on Woodward’s computer.

On the night of the killing, Bernstein and Woodward exchanged flirtatious text messages. They had known each other casually years earlier at the Orange County School of the Arts, where Woodward had a reputation based on his far-right, anti-gay views.

Woodward, who kept a “hate diary” in which he bragged of pranking and frightening gay men, had dropped out of college and was living with his parents. Bernstein, an openly gay University of Pennsylvania student, was staying with his parents over winter break in Lake Forest.

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