A TRAUMATIC 911 call revealed the horrific scene where a 19-year-old college student was bludgeoned to death with a Bacardi rum bottle in her off-campus apartment in 2012.
On the morning of September 7, 2012, Karena Rosario returned home to find her roommate Faith Hedgepeth, a sophomore at the University of North Carolina, hanging from her bed, bloody and unconscious.
“I just walked into my apartment, and my friend is like, unconscious. There’s blood everywhere. I don’t know what happened,”a distraught Rosario is heard telling a police operator.
“When you touch her, how does she feel? Does she feel warm?” the operator asked Rosario as she tries to calm her down.
“No, she feels cold,” Rosario responded.
The scene was as gruesome as the crime, blood splattered everywhere, a blood-covered Bacardi bottle found near Hedgepeth’s body, and a fast-food paper bag where the suspected killer wrote, “I’m not stupid b***h jealous.”
Hedgepeth was partially nude, her shirt covering her face and suffering from severe blunt force trauma.
Investigators recovered extensive DNA throughout the bedroom, including on the Bacardi rum bottle and a second bottle found at the scene, inside the victim’s body and on her boxer shorts.
But for nearly a decade, Chapel Hill police were unable to match the single male DNA until a breakthrough came in late 2020, when investigators turned to genetic genealogy.
Using the forensic technology, authorities built a family tree that linked them to Miguel Salguero-Olivares, a complete stranger with no ties to Hedgepeth but who lived in the area at the time of the murder, prosecutors said.
Authorities recovered DNA from Salguero-Olivares, now 33, when he was pulled over for suspicion of driving while impaired in August 2021.
Salguero-Olivares’ DNA matched the DNA recovered from Hedgepeth’s boxer shorts, on the fast-food paper bag, and the left palm print recovered from the Bacardi bottle used to beat the victim, according to prosecutors.
Prosecutors said Salguero-Olivares killed and sexually assaulted Hedgepeth in “a fit of rage.”
“He didn’t do this to her because of who she was, he did it because of who he is,” Durham Assistant District Attorney Angela Garcia-Lamarca said in her opening statements of Salguero-Olivares trial.
“He crept into her apartment, under the cover of darkness, he walked past the kitchen, took two bottles off the counter: the Bacardi bottle and the blue Riesling bottle.
“He dropped the blue Riesling bottle on the floor and used the Bacardi rum bottle to come down on her head.
“She didn’t even have a chance to get up and he did it again and again.”
James Rainsford, Salguero-Olivares’ defense attorney, refuted the prosecution’s claim that the defendant and Hedgepeth were complete strangers.
Rainsford argued that the DNA evidence found on Hedgepeth was from a previous consensual encounter.
“The state has repeatedly said, ‘Well, they didn’t know each other at all. They were complete strangers.’ Prove it. That’s just a throwaway statement,” Rainsford said in his opening statements.
Rainsford also suggested to the jury that the actual killer was Hedgepeth’s roommate, Rosario.
Rosario recounted to the jury the moment she discovered her roommate’s body in an emotional testimony.
“I walked in. The comforter was off the bed. It looked like it was pushed over to the left side, like on the floor” Rosario said of the harrowing morning.
“And I just saw a couple slick spots of blood. I walked around the bed and I saw her hair and I pulled the comforter down, and I saw that she had a black eye and she wasn’t wearing anything from the waist down.”
Source : https://www.the-sun.com/news/17135096/faith-hedgepeth-911-call-murder-unc/