Police had found a knife stained with Blaze’s blood in Sam’s room, along with blood inside Sam’s car. Sam had been arrested on January 12, 2018, and charged with the murder of a former classmate, 19-year-old Blaze Bernstein. Pasted on the right side of the box was the David Mamet line: “Coffee is for closers only.” In between Sam and his family sat the counsel table, with a box for defense attorneys submitting paperwork. “I never thought I’d wear polka dots again,” Michele had told a friend in the hallway. She was wearing a black blazer with black-and-white polka-dot pants. Sam could see his mom, Michele, close to the front of the room. A dirty undershirt poked through the collar of his orange jumpsuit. Usually clean-shaven, Sam sported a patchy, unkempt beard and a wiry mustache. His hair, which had been combed neatly to the right in his yearbook photos, now fell in a loose mess around his ears. He looked over at the judge and at his lawyer. He appeared to stand on his tiptoes for a moment, peering through the bars at the gallery where his parents and a couple of family friends sat. From his cage in the far back of a courtroom in Newport Beach, California, Sam Woodward looked around.
