Newly filed documents in the case of Faith Hedgepeth request independent testing of evidence collected from the crime scene in 2012.
Posted
8/7/2025, 8:31:07 PM
Updated
8/7/2025, 8:32:34 PM
By Kathy Hanrahan, WRAL senior multiplatform producer
Newly filed documents in the case of Faith Hedgepeth request independent testing of evidence collected from the crime scene in 2012.
Motions filed on Aug. 7 request the release and independent testing of evidence related to a blood stain on the bathroom doorframe in Hedgepeth’s apartment.
The filing was signed by James Rainsford, attorneys for Miguel Enrique Salguero-Olivares, who was charged with Hedgepeth’s murder.
An out-of-state witness attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in September 2012 when the murder occurred. The man was friends with Hedgepeth and her roommate, and after hanging out with them at a club the night of the murder, the roommate asked him to pick her up from their off-campus apartment around 4 a.m. The friend said the roommate was upset and had blood on one of her fingers when she entered the car he was driving.
Hedgepeth was later found beaten to death inside an apartment. She was 19.
WRAL News is not naming the roommate or potential witness since they have not been charged.
The motion states that Chapel Hill police conducted additional forensic investigation in the bathroom after learning of the roommate’s finger having blood. In doing so, police found a 2-inch long blood stain in the apartment’s bathroom on the lower part of the doorframe. It was near an area where the roommate said she had been sitting for just over an hour before she left the apartment.
“The blood stain appears to be in the form of a partial palmprint and partial fingerprint,” according to the motion which cites a photo of the stain shared with the defense.
The motion says that police made “tape lifts” of the stain for further testing but “didn’t believe the lifts provided sufficient information to permit a palmprint or fingerprint analysis.”
The motion says that the blood appeared to drip down the doorframe from the bottom of the stain, “suggesting that the print was left by someone who transferred blood from their hand onto the bathroom doorframe.”
The motion said that police collected a swab of the blood stain, but the swab has not been tested.
The defense is seeking all swabs, lifts, and other samples collected from the blood stain to be released and independently tested for DNA.