Faith Hedgepeth murder trial begins, roommate takes stand
After over a week of jury selection, the murder trial of University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill student Faith Hedgepeth is beginning.
Jury selection began Sept. 28. Twelve jurors were sat by Oct. 5, but the final alternate juror was not chosen until this morning.
Judge Keith O. Gregory begins the first day of the trial by reminding the jury of the rules, such as not watching, reading or listening to anything in the media or online about the trial, not communicating with anyone outside the jury about the details of the trial and not visiting the scene of the crime.
The prosecutor for the state of North Carolina begins her opening statements by describing Faith Hedgepeth as coming from a loving family.
She then goes on to talk about how the DNA of the suspect, Miguel Salguero Olivares, was found on Hedgepeth’s body when she was found in her apartment.
She also talks about Hedgepeth’s living situation with her roommate, Karena Rosario.
Salguero Olivares’ defense attorney begins opening statements by recounting the timeline Rosario, Hedgepeth’s roommate, gave of the night. He also talks about the witness statements of Jordan McCrary, a man who was with Rosario the night of Hedgepeth’s murder.
The lawyer then talks about the 911 call Rosario made when she returned to their apartment the next day and found Hedgepeth’s body.
“Is this a normal call? Or are there things about this call that are more than just noise?”
Both sides have spent a few minutes each talking about sperm and other DNA evidence found at the crime scene.
The defense said the state was trying to make it a “forensics case,” but also argued there were “gaps in evidence.”
He asked the jury to consider all the parts that were tested, including ones that didn’t show Salguero Olivares’ DNA profile and pieces that were never swabbed or tested.
“Make them prove it … It’s their burden beyond a reasonable doubt,” the lawyer said of the state’s case, adding of DNA evidence: “It doesn’t mean what you think.”
Alexis Evans, Faith Hedgepeth’s niece, is the first witness called to the stand by the prosecution.
She talks about growing up with Hedgepeth and the activities and groups they were involved with when they were young in their community and in their church.
Karena Rosario, who was Faith Hedgepeth’s roommate at their off-campus apartment in Chapel Hill in September 2012, begins her testimony. She quickly becomes emotional as she talks about Hedgepeth.
“Easy to open up to, easy to love, just an easy friend,” Rosario describes Hedgepeth through tears. “I grew up with a twin sister, so we were always together. Going to college on your own, you kind of just want to find your people, and she quickly become one of those people that I felt was like a sister.”
For the last few minutes, prosecution has been questioning Rosario about her living situation before she ended up as Hedgepeth’s roommate as well as what their living arrangement was like by September 2012.
Several exhibits have been introduced to the court, consisting mostly of maps, photos and diagrams of the apartment building they lived in as well as a layout of the one-bedroom apartment unit itself.
The prosecution is asking Rosario about the night before Hedgepeth was found dead.
Rosario describes the two girls as “in a great mood” while getting ready to go out together.
“We were just trying to like, I guess hype each other up for the night.”
She says the two girls went to The Thrill, a bar that also had a dancefloor and DJ located a block off Franklin Street. She says the place wasn’t packed, and she got both of them “red slushy drinks” that had tequila in it. Rosario says she remembers have a couple of those drinks plus a couple of shots.
The two girls stayed there for a bit, Rosario says, dancing and talking to people they knew. She names a few people who were there, including Jordan McCrary, who the defense has previously said was with her later that night and made a witness statement to police.
Rosario says no one left The Thrill with her and Hedgepeth and describes herself as “very intoxicated.”
Rosario says when she left her apartment with McCrary, who came to pick her up, she only took her phone with her. She did not take the apartment key, as she says, because she and Hedgepeth only shared one key.
The prosecutor asks if she locked the door behind her, to which she says she did not because she could not lock it from the outside without the key.
She says she spent the rest of the night at McCrary’s place and did not text Hedgepeth until later that morning before both of them were supposed to go to class. She says she began to get worried when she did not receive any response from Hedgepeth.
Rosario says she called her friend, Marisol, to take her back to her apartment as McCrary had already left for class. When they arrived, Rosario says they saw Hedgepeth’s car still in the parking lot of the complex. The two of them walked up to the apartment together.
The apartment’s front door was unlocked when they got there, Rosario says. She testifies that she didn’t see anything out of the ordinary except that the bathroom light was on, which she thought was unusual. She says she walked into the bedroom she and Hedgepeth shared and saw the comforter off the bed, “pushed over to the left side on the floor.”
Rosario describes seeing spots of blood, and then walking over and finding Hedgepeth’s body off the bed with her shirt pulled all the way up and nothing on her body from the waist down. She says she then called 911.
Rosario says she remembers panicking as she talked to the 911 operator.
“She was trying to ask me questions and I wasn’t really understanding what was going on. I just know that I wanted the ambulance to get there as quickly as they possibly could.”
She says the 911 operator asked her if Hedgepeth felt warm. Rosario says she touched her and she felt cold.
She recounts the first police officer arriving, going upstairs and telling her Hedgepeth “was gone.”
The prosecution has shown a photo of a blue bottle — believed to be the murder weapon — as an exhibit in court. Rosario testifies that the photo shows the location of the bottle as she saw it the morning she found Hedgepeth’s body on the floor of their bedroom.
Rosario is asked how many times she spoke to the police. She responds that it was many many times over the years, either in person or over the phone.
“I wanted to be helpful and I wanted to know what happened,” Rosario says when asked why she talked to investigators so many times.
The prosecutor then asks Rosario how it felt to not know what happened to her roommate and friend.
“It felt like I was going crazy. It felt like I was living in a nightmare. It felt like one day, I was just like a normal college student, and the next it felt like my whole life was flipped upside down, and the one person that I wanted to be there with me was not.”
Rosario says she has continued to make herself available to law enforcement until now, even after moving back home to New Jersey following her graduation from UNC.
She also testifies that she does not know Salguero Olivares and had seen him before or ever heard Hedgepeth mention him.
After giving the jury a few minutes to read Rosario’s written statement that she gave in September 2012, the prosecution had one more question for her and then told the judge they were finished with their questioning of the witness.
With court normally ending for the day at 5 p.m., Judge Gregory said he would push back the start of the defense team’s cross examination of Rosario until tomorrow morning.
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