From a former teacher of SW:
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/c...ein-california-stabbed-20-times-20180116.html
The man charged with fatally stabbing a University of Pennsylvania sophomore at least 20 times was described by a former teacher Tuesday as quiet, humorless, and outspoken in his political views.
“I can’t remember a single joke or a single light-hearted moment from him,” said Philip Schwadron, who taught acting to Samuel Lincoln Woodward in 10th grade in the fall of 2012 at the Orange County School of the Arts in Santa Ana, Calif.
Still, “I never thought I was looking into the 15-year-old eyes of a killer,” Schwadron said.
Both Woodward, 20, and his alleged victim, Blaze Bernstein, 19, had attended the exclusive school. Schwadron, who didn’t teach Bernstein, described Woodward as “very quiet, very serious, very direct.”
Meanwhile, Jake Chustz, a former student who knew Woodward at the school, said in an interview Tuesday that Woodward “had a reputation for being very strange and for rubbing people the wrong way.”
In Schwadron’s class, Woodward occasionally voiced conservative beliefs, mentioning at one point that President Barack Obama’s policy in Iraq was “wimpy” for not including more troops on the ground, the teacher said.
In his online musings, Woodward veered more sharply to the right.
Woodward defended the Confederate flag in a post as a symbol of “Southern pride, not hate,” according to the CBS Los Angeles affiliate, and in a thread on *******, a site that invites anonymous commenters to post questions to a specific person, said atheists will go to hell, and called Obama a “spineless coward” and an “arrogant, hypocritical, spineless socialist.”
These views unnerved Woodward’s classmates at the generally liberal performing arts school, which Schwadron said Woodward left after his sophomore year.
Michael Joseph Wells, a classmate of both Bernstein’s and Woodward’s, said in a public Facebook post that Woodward was “aggressive and made scary remarks to people.”
Wells, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, wrote that Bernstein was “playful and kind hearted” while Woodward always “was drawing guns when prompted to draw our favorite things.”