Defendant in Faith Hedgepeth murder seeks DNA tests, again focuses on roommate
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Defense seeks DNA testing on bloodstain found near where roommate said she sat.
- Attorneys again raise doubts about roommate Karena Rosario’s account and timeline.
- Defendant may have difficult time overcoming DNA evidence implicating him.
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Faith Hedgepeth Murder
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. Here are stories about Hedgepeth and the case from The News & Observer and The Herald-Sun.
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The man accused of the 2012 killing of UNC-Chapel Hill student Faith Hedgepeth is asking that more evidence be tested, and once again raises questions about her roommate’s location during the killing.
A motion filed Thursday on behalf of Miguel Salguero Olivares asks a judge to allow independent testing of a two-inch-long blood stain found near where the roommate said she was sitting in the bathroom before she left the apartment on the morning of the Sept. 7, 2012 killing.
Hedgepeth had temporarily moved in with her friend and fellow UNC student Karena Rosario in a one-bedroom apartment until she could move into her own place. On the morning of the killing, the women were together from midnight to 2:06 a.m. at The Thrill, a now-closed nightclub. After leaving the club, they returned to the apartment on the Chapel Hill and Durham border, according to court documents.
Rosario told police that she left her apartment around 4:25 a.m., after calling and asking someone she had seen at the club to come pick her up, according to court documents. Rosario returned to her apartment around 11 a.m. the next day when she called 911, frantic, saying she found an unresponsive Hedgepeth and blood all over pillows and a comforter.
After thousands of interviews and hundreds of tests on DNA samples, police turned to ancestry technology to identify a suspect, according to search warrants. They used DNA collected at the apartment to locate and interview distant relatives of Salguero Olivares, who was arrested and charged with murder in 2021.
A male’s DNA was collected for a rape kit, and found on a wine and liquor bottle and a note believed to be written by the killer, according to search warrants.
In November 2024, prosecutors added burglary, rape and sexual assault charges, alleging Salguero Olivares broke into Hedgepeth’s home and raped her.
New filing focuses on blood in bathroom
The new filing follows motions in July in which Salguero Olivares’s attorney pointed out that Rosario had blood on her finger the morning of Hedgepeth’s death, something Rosario and the UNC student who picked her up both told police.
Those filings contend that Rosario could have been in the apartment when Hedgepeth, 19, was killed and sought to test her and others’ fingerprints and compare them to those police found in the apartment.
The new filing, signed by defense attorney James Rainsford, seeks to test a “smudge of victim’s blood with drip” found inside the bathroom door frame. The blood was found “precisely beside the area Karena told CHPD she had been sitting from approximately 3:05 a.m. to the time she left the apartment at approximately 4:25 a.m. on Sept. 7, 2012,” the filing states.
Chapel Hill Police attempted to analyze the blood stains, which appear to be in the form of a partial palmprint and a partial fingerprint, but didn’t believe they had enough evidence for an analysis, the filing states.
Rainsford requests that all samples collected from the blood stain be released to the defense team for independent DNA testing, possibly to determine if any of it contains DNA from another anyone other than Hedgepeth.
The filings could be laying groundwork for a someone-else-did-it defense, or they could be highlighting holes in the case if Salguero Olivares, 32, is pushing for a favorable plea deal, Daniel Meier, a longtime Durham defense attorney who isn’t involved in the case, told The News & Observer previously.
Former Orange County Judge Carl Fox has said the filings could highlight problems in the case, but it will be a challenge for Salguero Olivares’ attorneys to overcome the DNA evidence found in her apartment. The News & Observer sent an email and left a telephone message with accounts associated with Rosario, which were identified in a commercial database compiled from public records. No messages were returned.
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Virginia Bridges covers criminal justice in the Triangle and across North Carolina for The News & Observer. Her work is produced with financial support from the nonprofit The Just Trust. The N&O maintains full editorial control of its journalism.
This story was originally published August 8, 2025 at 11:51 AM with the headline "Defendant in Faith Hedgepeth murder seeks DNA tests, again focuses on roommate."
