Found Deceased CA - Blaze Bernstein, 19, Lake Forest, 2 Jan 2018 #4

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Gussified said:
As someone pointed out earlier on this forum, the killer would have to be a complete idiot to return the body to that park a week later. I’m sure there are infinitely more sites that would be less risky than returning to the very park that has been the focal point of the investigation.

Besides, in the PC, the officer said they believe Blaze had been there since the night of his disappearance.
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Correct as a local, I can tell you not far from this park is miles and miles of back county with hiking trails all over the place. You could hide something here and it would take forever to find. So leaving it in the park I think was knee-jerk.

https://goo.gl/44wiQo

is a map of the area, if you zoom out just a tiny bit you can see what I am talking about.
 
veets said:
Correct as a local, I can tell you not far from this park is miles and miles of back county with hiking trails all over the place. You could hide something here and it would take forever to find. So leaving it in the park I think was knee-jerk.

https://goo.gl/44wiQo

is a map of the area, if you zoom out just a tiny bit you can see what I am talking about.
Click to expand...

:welcome4:
veets​

And thank you so much for this useful information. It means everything to a case on these threads when well meaning locals participate with information and context about the area. Much appreciated.
 
Staceydisem said:
I think you can consider where he was found being in the bushes - it's surrounded by bushes, so rather then them saying "he way laying in a shallow grave next to the bushes" they said he was in the bushes - also makes it sound like the body was harder to locate, as it did take them an entire week to find him. RIP, Blaze.
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I have to respectfully disagree. I do not believe Blaze was simply placed in the bushes. ALL WE KNOW AS FACT IS RAINS HELPED UNCOVER BLAZE. An earlier kind poster from previous thread walked the area & found likely recovery area with a lot of muddy footprints near. She said there was mulch as ground cover.
He may have been concealed in drainage pipe which was covered by mulch & after the act and mulch washed away during rain revealing the pipe again.
I do not believe he was merely under a bush but that his body was purposely concealed.
I’m VERY CURIOUS as to whether or not the drone search was productive in uncovering the burial site or not.
 
veets said:
Correct as a local, I can tell you not far from this park is miles and miles of back county with hiking trails all over the place. You could hide something here and it would take forever to find. So leaving it in the park I think was knee-jerk.

https://goo.gl/44wiQo

is a map of the area, if you zoom out just a tiny bit you can see what I am talking about.
Click to expand...

It was the knowledge of the Snapchat messages that determined it was this particular driver friend who picked up Blaze, right? Who uncovered the message...was it the parents? Was it LE?
So because of that, the driver had no choice to admit they went to the park, and concocted the story about a third person. (seemingly, since we are not sure yet if there was another POI)

I wonder, had the snapchat been private (since snapchat entries disappear immediately), would anyone have known? i guess LE would have checked whether Blaze had been in communication with anyone, and discovered through the Cloud?

Had the driver not been privy to the disclosure of the Snapchat convo, he could very well have taken Blaze away to some isolated spot in the hills after the park rendezvous rather than admitting he was with Blaze that night.. Thinking aloud...

I have Snapchatted with my DD on occasion, but it immediately disappears, and I have no record. Then again I'm not really knowledgeable about this platform.
 
whitelilac said:
It was the knowledge of the Snapchat messages that determined it was this particular driver friend who picked up Blaze, right? Who uncovered the message...was it the parents? Was it LE?
So because of that, the driver had no choice to admit they went to the park, and concocted the story about a third person. (seemingly, since we are not sure yet if there was another POI)

I wonder, had the snapchat been private (since snapchat entries disappear immediately), would anyone have known? i guess LE would have checked whether Blaze had been in communication with anyone, and discovered through the Cloud?

Had the driver not been privy to the disclosure of the Snapchat convo, he could very well have taken Blaze away to some isolated spot in the hills after the park rendezvous rather than admitting he was with Blaze that night.. Thinking aloud...

I have Snapchatted with my DD on occasion, but it immediately disappears, and I have no record. Then again I'm not really knowledgeable about this platform.
Click to expand...

That's my understanding of Snapchat as well, i.e. messages are expired and deleted very quickly. I've asked a similar question before and didn't really get a response as to the source of this information. As far as I know, the only reason we know about Snapchat is from the driver's story. I'm not aware of anyone that has corroborated that at all, but I'd be curious to know if anyone knows of someone that did. I know it has been mentioned in several news stories and even by the family attorney, but I think it's all hearsay sourced back to the driver's story.
 
andalso said:
Just a quick housekeeping note.
If you want to reply to another post and include their quote in your reply hit Reply with Quote. Then under the type area you will see a Go Advanced button. When there you can preview your post ( it will show in a box above the type area).

Hope this info is helpful!!
Click to expand...

Bumping my own post.
 
whitelilac said:
It was the knowledge of the Snapchat messages that determined it was this particular driver friend who picked up Blaze, right? Who uncovered the message...was it the parents? Was it LE?
So because of that, the driver had no choice to admit they went to the park, and concocted the story about a third person. (seemingly, since we are not sure yet if there was another POI)

I wonder, had the snapchat been private (since snapchat entries disappear immediately), would anyone have known? i guess LE would have checked whether Blaze had been in communication with anyone, and discovered through the Cloud?

Had the driver not been privy to the disclosure of the Snapchat convo, he could very well have taken Blaze away to some isolated spot in the hills after the park rendezvous rather than admitting he was with Blaze that night.. Thinking aloud...

I have Snapchatted with my DD on occasion, but it immediately disappears, and I have no record. Then again I'm not really knowledgeable about this platform.
Click to expand...

Blaze was using snapchat that night, then he texted his high school buddy / driver his home address so that driver could pick him up. Text message numbers will show up on my carrier's online billing not long after they're sent. Since Blaze had a relative's loaner phone, the family probably had easy access to the text records (this is speculation).

The initial stories implied that Blaze was snapchatting Person #3 (and likely other friends) to maintain anonymity / privacy with Person #3, then texted HS Buddy Driver because he wouldn't have been concerned about privacy with a known friend.

Blaze's father did also access a computer to try to locate other SM information. (MOO, I think the text would have been the easiest path to trace.)

https://www.aol.com/article/news/20...he-left-parents-home-to-meet-friend/23326079/


On Wednesday afternoon, Blaze missed a dental appointment. Gideon said that’s when he started to worry.


“I left work early and we came back to the house and started to pour through the computer and figure out what messages he had sent were relevant to what he had been up to in the last 24 hours,” Gideon said.


They contacted law enforcement and filed a missing person's report.
 
Marie A said:
I have to respectfully disagree. I do not believe Blaze was simply placed in the bushes. ALL WE KNOW AS FACT IS RAINS HELPED UNCOVER BLAZE. An earlier kind poster from previous thread walked the area & found likely recovery area with a lot of muddy footprints near. She said there was mulch as ground cover.
He may have been concealed in drainage pipe which was covered by mulch & after the act and mulch washed away during rain revealing the pipe again.
I do not believe he was merely under a bush but that his body was purposely concealed.
I’m VERY CURIOUS as to whether or not the drone search was productive in uncovering the burial site or not.
Click to expand...

I'm on an iPad and can't for the life of me figure out how to bring something over from the media thread for Blaze's case but I can direct you, if you go to the media page for this case, (link at the bottom of this page) scroll down to the 7th post, 3rd paragraph, it states Blaze was found in the brush. He was not found in the drainage pipe, that was speculation in the part of a WS poster who went to the park and video taped the area she thought he was in. HTH
 
whitelilac said:
I have Snapchatted with my DD on occasion, but it immediately disappears, and I have no record. Then again I'm not really knowledgeable about this platform.
Click to expand...

If you don't read a Snapchat message, it stays there until you do. In the early part of the investigation, it said his parents accessed a message that was used to identify the friend. If Blaze had a secondary device that had been logged in (like an iPad), his parents may have opened the Snapchat message from the POI because Blaze had not opened the last message. Then it would have disappeared.

A recent murder case in NJ involved Snapchat. In order to obtain a killer's confession, a friend spoke to him on Snapchat and used a digital camera to capture the images of the conversation.
 
I think it's easy to look back in hindsight, should have done this, or that. During and after the event, the driver was no doubt in a panic, couldn't think straight, maybe scared to death someone would see him if he got Blaze back into the car, even at 4 am. So he "buried" him in the far corner of the park.

If he had taken him far into the back country, Blaze's body might not have been found. At least there would have been no body, DNA, COD etc........doubt.
 
Lets talk about dirt.

Does anyone know.

What is the density (if that's the right word) of the dirt in the park. Would a person be able to dig into it significantly with their bare hands? And, would digging with ones bare hands in said dirt cause cuts and scrapes to the hands?

Additionally, is it possible to match the dirt under the perps nails to the dirt in the park? Versus the dirt in the non existent dirt puddle?

TIA
 
andalso said:
Lets talk about dirt.

Does anyone know.

What is the density (if that's the right word) of the dirt in the park. Would a person be able to dig into it significantly with their bare hands? And, would digging with ones bare hands in said dirt cause cuts and scrapes to the hands?

Additionally, is it possible to match the dirt under the perps nails to the dirt in the park? Versus the dirt in the non existent dirt puddle?

TIA
Click to expand...

The dirt in this area is very hard and clay like. I couldn't see anyone digging a shallow grave without tools. Maybe if this happened after our rain, but we had been very dry for a few months.
 
andalso said:
Lets talk about dirt.

Does anyone know.

What is the density (if that's the right word) of the dirt in the park. Would a person be able to dig into it significantly with their bare hands? And, would digging with ones bare hands in said dirt cause cuts and scrapes to the hands?

Additionally, is it possible to match the dirt under the perps nails to the dirt in the park? Versus the dirt in the non existent dirt puddle?

TIA
Click to expand...

I've wondered about this. I know it would not be possible to dig even two inches in the dirt here...very dense and clay like, with stones.....I live about 50 miles north. I even have problems with a shovel.

But I don't know what it's like in that park....is is loose, regularly groomed with fresh loam?
Or was Blake put under layers of wood chips?
 
Local radio news just said an arrest has been made. Waiting for more info to be released.

Sent from my SM-G955U using Tapatalk
 
I live 15 mins from here, and my daughter used to have soccer here. The dirt is as you said, dense, clay, and stones.
 
What if the driver was just responsible for getting Blaze to the park and the driver had other friends at the park waiting. Maybe they did have a fight club only Blaze was the target and it went too far and he was beaten to death by multiple people. Everyone panicked and hid the body. If cops suspect that other people were involved that could explain why they haven’t arrested just the driver yet. They could be waiting to see who the driver continues to communicate with, what DNA comes back as being found, etc. They want a slam dunk case and I bet they’re looking at multiple people right now. They can’t arrest them all for the same thing and hope something sticks to one of them. They need all their ducks in a row so everyone responsible is punished accordingly.
 
This recent discussion of SnapChat got me thinking about what we really "know" or don't know about the facts of this case, so I went back to read some of the initial media stories.

This is from the patch.com story on Jan. 5th:

"Annee Della Donna, an attorney and friend of the family, discussed the timeline since Blaze's mysterious disappearance."At 9:30 p.m., he sent a text message with his family's Lake Forest address for a high school buddy to pick him up and take him to the park to meet the third person," she said. "The park is five minutes away and they got there about 10:30 p.m. Bernstein went off alone into the park while his friend waited back in the car."

Two things about this:

1) Here (and in other stories I read) they say the evidence of contact between Blaze and the driver is via 'text message'. Text (SMS) messages are different than SnapChat and don't disappear until manually deleted. I'm curious if they were using the term 'text message' generically and it could have been SnapChat or if it really was an SMS message, which is a very basic form of phone communication and NOT Internet/app based.

2) This article doesn't state where the attorney got this info - from the message itself or from the driver's story. If they actually read the message then it casts many theories about why Blaze left the house aside, does it not?

There are several other things in the quote above which I think are unverifiable and certainly just the attorney and reporter articulating the driver's story. At that point they possibly had no reason to doubt him, but if he's a potential suspect and given the affidavit, etc., we need to take a closer look at all of the the early reporting and discern what things the family were repeating that were part of the driver's story versus those that are verifiable facts.

I'm also unclear about how we know in general what was on SnapChat vs. SMS - most of the reporting simply says 'text message'
 
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