Rosario Testifies in Trial of Faith Hedgepeth's Killer

Karena Rosario, 34, stood before the jury and described a scene that shattered her world. She spoke with tears streaming down her face after prosecutors finished their opening remarks on Wednesday morning. Her testimony came while Miguel Enrique Salguero-Olivares, 33, sat in the courtroom for day one of his trial regarding the murder and rape of Faith Hedgepeth.

The young woman Rosario knew as a sister was found dead in their off-campus apartment on September 7, 2012. She was only 19 years old at the time. Investigators waited nine long years to make an arrest until Salguero-Olivares took custody on September 16, 2021.

Rosario recounted walking into the room and seeing a comforter pushed off the bed onto the floor. She saw blood spots immediately. Pulling the covers down revealed Hedgepeth's hair and a black eye. The victim was naked from the waist down with her shirt pulled all the way up. A taunting note sat next to the body on a fast-food bag: 'I'm not stupid b***h jealous.'

Rosario explained that she felt upset earlier that night, which led Hedgepeth to drive them both home from The Thrill nightclub around 3am. Rosario remembered her friend holding her hands and promising everything would be okay. She tried calling Hedgepeth after picking up a key from Jordan McCrary's house, but got no answer. She worried the victim had taken their shared apartment key to class.

Another friend, Marisol Rangel, eventually picked Rosario up before they returned to the apartment. They found the bathroom light on when they arrived. Rosario did not take the door key with her because whoever left last was responsible for locking it. The gravity of the discovery hit hard as she detailed every step from that final night until finding a body instead of a friend.

Hedgepeth's body lay covered in blood, a crimson mess that stained the walls and sheets of the bedroom. "We're walking through, we get to the bedroom and all you could see was just blood everywhere," Rangel recounted. "Faith was wrapped in a comforter. And so, we just froze and we had to call for 911." Rosario added her own chilling detail when she touched the victim; Hedgepeth felt cold to the touch.

The Chapel Hill Police arrived at the apartment shortly after. Rosario asked them if they were going to summon an ambulance, but Hedgepeth was already pronounced dead. "I felt like I was going crazy," she said. "I felt like I was living in a nightmare." She described how one day she was just a normal college student and the next her whole life flipped upside down, leaving the person she wanted beside her gone. Following that tragedy, Rosario left UNC but returned a year later to finish her degree before moving out of state.

Rosario's testimony continued on Thursday morning alongside McCrary and Ervin Mitchell, a security worker at The Thrill nightclub, along with other witnesses standing in court. This hearing comes after Salguero-Olivares was arrested and charged back in 2021. He has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder, first-degree rape, first-degree sexual offense, and first-degree burglary. The community now faces the difficult task of processing these grim details while waiting for justice to be served.