Faith Hedgepeth was a UNC sophomore when she was killed on Sept. 7, 2012. Her murder was unsolved until Sept. 16, 2021, when Chapel Hill police made an arrest in her case. The murder trial begins Sept. 28, 2026. Here’s ongoing coverage about Hedgepeth and the case.
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Prosecutors questioned a neighbor of Faith Hedgepeth and an extended relative of suspect Miguel Salguero Olivares on Friday as the murder trial for the UNC-Chapel Hill student entered its eighth day of testimony.
Hedgepeth, a 19-year-old UNC-Chapel Hill student, was found beaten to death in her apartment on the Durham-Chapel Hill border in 2012. Prosecutors say DNA evidence led them to Salguero Olivares, who has pleaded not guilty to charges of rape and murder.
Prosecutors and the defense spent much of Wednesday and Thursday on the testimony of Erin Ermish, a State Crime Lab forensic scientist who has handled DNA analysis of crime scene items in the case since 2012.
Here are highlights from Friday’s testimony.
After his 2021 arrest, investigators traced Salguero Olivares’ employment to several jobs — including an Outback Steakhouse across the street from the Red Robin where Hedgepeth worked.
Justin Heinrich, special agent in charge for the N.C. State Bureau of Investigation, presented a map to jurors showing the proximity between the restaurants, as well as between Hedgepeth’s apartment at The Hawthorne at The View and where investigators believed Salguero Olivares was living at King’s Arms, a complex a few miles south.
Heinrich detailed the SBI’s wide-reaching investigation — including a spreadsheet of more than 1,700 names of people who may have been somehow connected to Hedgepeth and the scene of the crime — but said there was nothing linking Salguero Olivares to Hedgepeth’s circle, besides the proximity of their workplaces and residences.
Heinrich — who’s been involved in the Hedgepeth investigation since 2013 — also said he’s conducted interviews with Karena Rosario for years, who he described as “very cooperative.” Rosario has long been the center of speculation in the case as one of the last people to interact with Hedgepeth before her death, with defense attorneys attempting to raise questions on whether she was in the apartment during the killing.
“She’s always made herself available to investigators whenever we had further questions, even if it was a small question that we needed to just get satisfied with a phone call,” Heinrich testified. “She hasn’t changed her phone number over the last 14 years. Even when she returned to the state that she’s from, she’s continued to be available to us.”
The jury will get to compare a sample of Salguero Olivares’ handwriting with the handwritten note found on a fast-food bag after Hedgepeth’s death, after Judge Keith Gregory determined there was sufficient similarity in the samples.
Investigators found the bag near Hedgepeth’s body, reading “I’M NOT STUPID B- – – -” and “JEALOUS.” Male DNA was also recovered from the bag.
Prosecutors introduced a motion for the evidence to be considered, which requires a judge to decide if there is enough similarity for it to be presented to the jury.
“I’m not a handwriting expert, but I’m not required to be, and I believe there is enough here that’s similar between these items,” the judge said.
The state called upon Luis Lainez Lopez, who hosted a cookout at Hedgepeth’s apartment complex on the night she was killed.
Lainez Lopez said he sometimes saw Hedgepeth in the parking lot outside his building, pointing out on a map and property photos the area where she sometimes parked in the rear of the building and the stretch of grass where he hosted the cookout.
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Lopez testified that the gathering on Sept. 6, 2012, was the sole cookout he hosted on the property because he and his wife both had the same day off from work. His wife’s brothers-in-law — about six men who lived with the couple and their young daughter — attended the cookout and drank beer into the early morning hours, between 3 and 5 a.m.
Lainez Lopez said his wife invited her distant cousin, Abel, who later invited his own friend, who Lainez Lopez did not know.
When asked if Salguero Olivares was the friend, Lainez Lopez said he did not know and did not recognize the defendant.
The prosecution called upon Eldis Cordero Ordonez, whose sister is married to Salguero Olivares’ uncle. Cordero Ordonez said despite him and Salguero Olivares having mutual family members and both coming to the U.S. from Guatemala, the two weren’t close.
Through an interpreter, Cordero Ordonez said he remembers telling law enforcement after Hedgepeth’s death that he didn’t hang out with Salguero Olivares often because “he used to drink and do other things.”
“The only thing that made us relate one to another was his uncle that was married to my sister,” Cordero Ordonez said. “We never grew up together. I was never friends with him in Guatemala, and neither were we here.”
Cordero Ordonez said he used to live at the Willow Brook Apartments — later named the Hawthorne at the View apartments, where Hedgepeth lived and was killed — until 2009 or 2010. He also worked at an Outback Steakhouse for a few years, where Salguero Olivares also worked for just a few months.
Cordero Ordonez testified that he’d once seen his wife’s family hanging out at a picnic table outside the apartments. Prosecutors have said Salguero Olivares did not know Hedgepeth, but that he had attended a cookout near her apartment that lasted into the early morning hours on the night she was killed.
But despite what he described as only a small relationship with Salguero Olivares, Cordero Ordonez said he was previously “not feeling comfortable about testifying.” He said Salguero Olivares’ mother called him a few weeks ago and told him to “tell the truth.”
“There’s been people who said they saw me spending time with those people at the picnic table,” he said. “And I know that is not true.”
Cordero Ordonez was dismissed without questioning from the defense.
Assistant District Attorney Angela Garcia-Lamarca opened Friday by asking Ermish to clarify why DNA samples collected from a Bacardi bottle — which investigators say was used to kill Hedgepeth — contained a positive DNA match for Salguero Olivares in a 2021 test but was inconclusive in a later probe in 2025.
Ermish testified that the conflicting results didn’t surprise her, as it’s possible that fingerprint processing conducted after the first test removed some DNA from the bottle. She also said she already hadn’t expected a substantial amount of skin DNA given the smooth surface of the bottle.
Defense attorney James Rainsford pressed Ermish on why she didn’t test more areas of the bottle, after she testified that she consulted with the latent testing department to identify areas to collect samples without impacting any fingerprint evidence.
Ermish said investigators consider which sections are less likely to contain DNA evidence but more likely to have fingerprints, pointing to the small likelihood of getting a DNA profile from the small area of the neck of the Bacardi bottle.
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This story was originally published October 16, 2026 at 9:45 AM.