A college teen vanishes while home on winter break. Will messages on his social media help his family’s personal search? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What happened to Blaise Bernstein?
And by all accounts, Blaze is this bright, gifted teenager with a sharp wit and a warm heart.
I've known Blaze since we were babies. Blaze as a kid, besides being very high energy, he was really creative. He was very thoughtful.
Blaise was incredibly bright, curious. He was really a Renaissance young man. I mean, he was interested in everything.
Surrounded by family and friends, Blaise was bar mitzvahed in 2011. That's a Jewish celebration of adulthood on a boy's 13th birthday. It was an occasion especially meaningful to his grandmother.
I did know that his grandmother was from Romania and survived the Holocaust.
I really think that Blaze got it. He was proud to be a Jew, humanistic philosophy, caring about the world and understanding the world's only going to change if human beings change it.
But even though Blaze possessed that understanding, it offered no protection from becoming a target of frequent bullying.
Growing up in Lake Forest was not super easy for him. He was bullied every single day on the bus. He just wanted to get out of the public school system.
And it wasn't just the bullying. Even though Blaise is a good student, he longs for something more. Go, man, go! Something that challenged him, not just intellectually, but creatively. And he would find it at OSHA.
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Chapter 2: Who were the key figures in Blaise's case?
Blaze auditioned for OSHA. He was artistic in every single way possible. He was very creative.
His talents going in were performing arts and writing, and he wanted to move into the creative writing department.
We've had students who wound up professional actors, designers, you know, writers, the whole thing, musicians.
Among the more famous OSHA alumni are actors Pedro Pascal, class of 1993, who starred in the HBO hit The Last of Us, and Matthew Morrison, a 1997 graduate and star in Fox's popular TV series Glee. I want you to listen very closely to the lyrics because I really mean what I'm singing.
Once Blaise got to OSHA, he felt like there was a community there for him. He had a lot of friends, he was very social.
I met Blaise when he was a senior in high school. He shared some of his writing with me and I wrote a letter of advocacy for his application when he applied early decision to Penn because he was a brilliant writer.
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Chapter 3: What were the circumstances leading up to Blaise's disappearance?
Blaise's exceptional talents got him into the University of Pennsylvania, and he moved across the country to Philadelphia as a pre-med freshman in the class of 2020. Was he homesick at the start?
I think that the first semester at school was difficult for him in terms of his social life there. He was used to being in a small school. You know, now he's a little fish in a big sea, and I think that he had to come to grips with that.
When I found out that he was going to an Ivy League, I was like, oh, you know, that makes sense.
At Penn, Blaze got involved in Penn Appetit.
Pen Appetit is a student-run magazine for people who are interested in writing and also interested in food. He knew that those would be his people.
Our photographer for Pen Appetit, he held a photo shoot where we dressed up in our chef's whites and aprons. We brought whisks and knives. We have photos of him, you know, holding the whisk, being surprised. I mean, he was so helpful and we're so fortunate to have these photos of him.
It was a Tuesday in January, and 19-year-old Blaise was home for winter break. He was in a really good place and looking forward to second semester of his sophomore year, but not before he treated his family to a special meal.
He was baking butternut squash with, you know, sprigs of thyme that were inside them. And he made a turkey.
He took over my job, more or less. I was on vacation, and he was here.
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Chapter 4: How did social media play a role in the search?
So we called the Sheriff's Department.
They came and they were really downplaying it, like, oh, you know, 19-year-olds, they run away sometimes, but they'll be back.
He was adamant that 100% of the time that these kids are out on a booty call or doing something with, yeah, he told me.
Of course, we explained that there were some, you know, unique circumstances with regards to, you know, his personal belongings still being here. And so they offered to do a missing persons report.
So a kid disappears without his glasses, his wallet, or his keys. There were people who actually told me about it just in the couple of days after he went missing, who suggested that maybe this was suicide. Did you ever contemplate that? Never.
Not even close. He was so happy. He was in a great place.
He was in one of the best places I had ever seen him before. That week, he was so happy. He was so excited to go back to school. He was so excited to just have the rest of his life. And so at that point, there was no doubt in my mind. He would never have done that.
gideon and genie confirmed with verizon that blaze had made any recent phone calls a quick check of his computer revealed no exchanges on imessage or facebook dms and so with virtually no solid information to go on the bernsteins along with help from their 14 year old daughter bowie began dipping deeper into blaze's social media
We would not have been able to figure it out without the help of kids his age that he grew up with.
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Chapter 5: What were the findings from the investigation?
We were spending every minute talking about it. People were filming in our house, interviewing my parents. Nothing like this ever happened where we were.
Any sign of him, any clothing, obviously him. We're hoping to find him, hoping that he's just incapacitated and in need of some medical assistance so that we can get him and bring him home safely.
There was like this team of people with drones and they were going throughout Whiting Ranch Wilderness Park where we were concerned maybe my brother was back there and maybe there was a mountain lion or maybe like something happened to him and he was missing or lost.
For the fourth night in a row, the Bernstein family will go to sleep without their oldest son at home.
It was clear as the week wore on that it was more and more dire. A lot of pressure.
Immense pressure to perform.
Then, on January 9th, with Blaze missing for seven days now, a discovery which upends the case.
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Chapter 6: What evidence was discovered in the park?
Jack and I were teamed up. Jack said, Dylan. You heard it in his voice. I could hear it in his voice.
We're going to turn now to those new developments and the mysterious disappearance of an Ivy League student.
19-year-old Blaise Bernstein missing while home for winter break.
The Sheriff's Department launched an extensive search with help from the community.
Days had passed since Blaze vanished into the night. The relentless search by police and volunteers had turned up nothing, just more anguish for the Bernsteins and frustration for authorities.
The Orange County Sheriff's Department searched the park, but they haven't seen any signs of Blaze.
We utilized cadaver dogs. We utilized drones. We had been to Borrego Park and searched that park over and over again with a fine-tooth comb.
On January 9th, a week after Blaze went missing, investigators decided to go back to Borrego Park one more time after obtaining cell phone data showing Blaze and Sam Woodward were there together. And this is a week after Blaze went missing.
Yeah, it led us to this particular area when all of a sudden Blaze Bernstein's phone at that point in time turned off.
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Chapter 7: What was the outcome of Blaise's case?
They must have found his cell phone as well.
We located a broken cell phone about probably six inches, eight inches below where the body was found.
I was sitting in my English class in eighth grade and the teacher got a call and he was like, Bowie, you're gonna go to the office, they need you for something. And I was like, oh good, maybe some good news. And they took me into this room and I saw my godmother. She was crying and I looked at her and she just hugged me and she said they found him He is dead. Blaze is gone.
To the index, in the body of a college student found in Lake Forest, California, Blaze Bernstein had disappeared one week ago, the case now a homicide.
That was the end of hope for me.
We started off this journey over a week ago, looking for our son and asking for everyone to help us find Blaise Bernstein. And we just have learned that they have positively identified our son, Blaise's body today.
I just felt so numb, like nothing that had happened in my life had mattered anymore. And then when I got home, my dad was just like,
He was just defeated, but he just said, like, it's gonna be okay. Like, we have each other, it's gonna be okay. Sorry.
The specific details of what occurred at Bruegel Park are part of the ongoing investigation.
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