Louder Than the Noise: Faith Hedgepeth's Murder Trial Opens on One Word

Faith Hedgepeth was 19. She was a biology student at UNC Chapel Hill who wanted to be a pediatrician, a former high school cheerleader from the small Haliwa-Saponi community around Hollister, North Carolina, and she was on track to be the first person in her family to finish college. On the morning of September 7, 2012, her best friend walked into the one-bedroom apartment they shared, pulled down a comforter, and found her dead.

Fourteen years and one month later, on Wednesday, October 7, 2026, a Durham County jury heard the State of North Carolina tell them who it believes killed her. Within the first ten seconds of the trial, the case had a word.

That was the first sentence of the State's opening statement. About an hour later, the defense ended its own opening by handing the same word back to the jury: "Is it just DNA and the rest is noise?"

Every minute of Day 1 of State of North Carolina v. Miguel Enrique Salguero-Olivares ran between those two lines. The State says one stranger's DNA, on the bottle it calls the weapon and across the room where Faith died, answers a question that sat open for nine years. The defense says DNA cannot tell a jury when or how it got there, and that a 2012 investigation that lost a blood swab it never tested left exactly the doubt the State is calling noise.

Miguel Salguero-Olivares has pleaded not guilty to the charges. He was arrested in September 2021 and has been held without bond ever since, which means he has spent five years in a jail cell without being convicted of anything. He is presumed innocent, and the judge told the jury exactly that before either side said a word. Nothing in this article is a finding. It is what was said and shown in open court on Day 1, and the questions it leaves on the table.

Here is the frame for everything that follows. Two witnesses testified on Day 1. Neither one connects the defendant to Faith or to her apartment. By the State's own account, that connection is DNA and prints, and not a single forensic witness has taken the stand yet. So Day 1 was not a test of who. It was a fight over what counts as noise, and the first afternoon of testimony handed both sides material for their version of the word.

The rules before the story

Judge Keith O. Gregory of Durham County Superior Court started with the room before he started with the jury. No photographs, one agreed camera, nothing recording at either counsel table. He ran a tight room all day.

Then the jury came in, and he read them the preliminary instructions, the plain-English rulebook a jury gets before it hears a single fact. Two of those rules matter for everything below.

The first is the presumption of innocence. "The defendant is innocent of any crime unless and until the state proves the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt." The second is what an opening statement is, and what it is not. "An opening statement is not evidence and must not be considered by you as evidence," he told them. An opening is a forecast, a promise to the jury, and promises are what this channel keeps score on.

He told them one more thing that comes back before the morning is over. When the court sustains an objection, he said, the jurors "must disregard the question and the answer if one has been given." And if the court grants a motion to strike, they must put the stricken words out of their minds. Hold onto that. By lunch, the jury had heard words the court sustained an objection to, and nobody moved to strike them.

"Louder than the noise"

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 1, THE OPENINGS Faith Hedgepeth Murder Trial Opens: 'Louder Than the Noise' DNA vs. a Lost Blood Swab / Pt 1

Senior Assistant District Attorney Angela Garcia-Lamarca opened for the State, and she built Faith before she built the crime. Nineteen years old. A UNC student from "a very loving family, part of a close-knit community, the Haliwa-Saponi tribe in Hollister, North Carolina." Then the line that frames the loss: "She was going to be the first person in her family to graduate college, and she was on track."

Then the State's account of the early morning of September 7, 2012. The defendant, she said, "crept into her apartment, beat her in the head," committed the other acts behind the charges, and left her there. And then the inventory, delivered as a drumbeat, almost every item opening the same way. He left his DNA on the rum bottle the State calls the murder weapon. He left it on the boxer shorts Faith slept in. He left it in samples taken from her body. He left his DNA, a palm print and a left thumbprint on a blue wine bottle found on the floor at the foot of the bed. He left his DNA on a white paper food bag with a partly eaten sandwich still inside it, and on that bag, the State says, a handwritten note he left "for the person who found her body."

That list is the State's case on identity. There is no eyewitness, no confession, no surveillance video of anyone entering that apartment. There is that list. Keep it in front of you as you read the rest of the day, because almost everything the defense said was aimed at one item on it or another.

Why did it take nine years? The State's answer is that he was a stranger. "This defendant was a stranger to Faith. And she to him." Chapel Hill police, which the prosecutor described as "a small town police department" with "like two to three murders a year," started with the people closest to Faith and worked outward "in concentric circles." They talked to hundreds of people. They took DNA swabs from hundreds of people. "They ran out of circles." The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, the SBI, came in about a year later, and the two agencies worked it together. The whole time, she said, investigators were holding what the forensic pathologist's swabs had given them within a few weeks of Faith's death: one single male DNA profile.

The years between 2012 and 2021, she told the jury, "created a lot of noise." People filled in the blanks, "because that's what humans do. We try to make sense of the senseless." Some of that noise, she said, "sounded a lot like conspiracy theory." And when the defendant was found in 2021, it all fell away, "because it was only ever noise." Then the sentence the State wants the jury to carry into the deliberation room: "Listen to the evidence, not the noise."

The night itself, as the State told it, went like this. Faith and her best friend and roommate, Karena Rosario, studied at the library, then went to a downtown club called The Thrill. Faith was the designated driver and barely drank. Rosario drank a lot. They got home around 3 a.m. Rosario was sick, then spent an hour or more on the bathroom floor, then left with a friend, Jordan McCrary, a little after 4. The two women shared one key between them, so the door was left unlocked, "because that's what they did." Around 9 a.m., Rosario could not reach Faith, got a ride back from another friend, and found her under the bedspread. The 911 operator asked her to touch Faith's body. "And you hear her say, she's cold."

The State also previewed how it will put a stranger near Faith's door. It told the jury the defendant came to the United States from Guatemala in 2010, joined his mother, and worked for a while at a Durham Outback Steakhouse where other relatives worked too. It said a number of people from Guatemala, some of them connected to that family, lived in Faith's apartment complex. And it promised a witness who lived directly across the parking lot, who will testify about a cookout at a picnic table "right next to where Faith parked her car," running from about 6 p.m. until about 5 the next morning. Proximity first. Then DNA.

The sentence the State chose to say out loud

And then came the line I think will matter most at the end of this trial.

The State told the jury the defendant acted "in a fit of rage." Not because he knew Faith. Not because of who she was. It said he took two bottles off the kitchen counter, dropped the wine bottle on the bedroom floor, and used the rum bottle "to come down on her head," and that "he did it again and again and again." And in the middle of that, the prosecutor said this:

Read that again. On the first morning of trial, the State told the jury it may never show them why. No motive. No relationship. No account of how a man it says never met Faith ended up inside her bedroom in the dark, in a rage, at an hour when her roommate had just walked out an unlocked door. Nothing to fill that space except the DNA itself.

That is honest, and I respect it. It is also a hole, and the State chose to name it first, on its own terms, before the defense could name it for them. That is good trial craft. The prosecutor then called the case "devastating" and "horrifying," and in the same breath, "simple." That is the tension the State now has to carry for weeks. Can a case be simple when the State concedes it may never explain the why?

The State's answer will be that the law does not require a motive. That is true. The jury does not have to know why to decide who. But here is the question a watchdog has to ask out loud on Day 1: if the only thing that explains the who is DNA, then everything rides on what that DNA can and cannot tell a jury. And that is precisely where the defense went next.

"Is it just DNA and the rest is noise?"

Lead defense counsel James Rainsford stood up and took the word away from the State in his first sentence. "I heard a lot about evidence, and I've heard a lot about noise."

He said he likes to go chronologically, and the first thing he went after was the timeline the State's whole account rests on. And here this article has to be precise, because the court has drawn a line, and the line is part of the story.

Karena Rosario has never been charged with anything. On September 21, 2026, before trial, Judge Gregory granted the State's motion barring the defense from arguing that she, or anyone else other than the defendant, is guilty. Under that order, specific facts may come in. The argument about where those facts lead may not. So what follows in this section is what the defense told the jury in an opening statement, which the judge had just told them is not evidence. None of it is an accusation by this channel, and under the court's order, it is not one the defense is allowed to make either. What the defense can do, and plainly intends to do, is put the 2012 investigation on trial.

The defense told the jury that Rosario's written statement puts her in the bathroom from about 3:05 to 4:20 a.m. It said she texted Jordan McCrary and then called him around 4, asking him to come get her, and that he lived 15 to 20 minutes away. The bathroom had no door. By the defense's measure, the bedroom was only steps away. "So now you've got 90 minutes, no communication," Rainsford said, and he asked the jury whether it was odd that a loving friend like Faith never came to check on her roommate crying a few steps away. "That's going to be up to you to decide."

Then he told them about a voicemail. According to the defense, on the evening of September 7, McCrary called the police and described picking Rosario up that morning: "I looked over and she was doing something to her hand. And she said, Why do I have blood on my hand?" Rainsford told the jury he believes it is "the only voicemail they have." He said police then asked the SBI to test McCrary's car, and that a spot on the interior passenger side, near the door handle, gave a presumptive positive reaction for blood. A presumptive test is a quick chemical screen. A positive result means the substance is probably blood. It says nothing about whose.

Here is how I read what the defense was doing, inside the fence the court built. It cannot tell the jury someone else did this. So it is telling the jury the police had things in front of them in the first 48 hours, things a proper investigation is supposed to chase down, and asking what was done with them. "It's not noise," Rainsford said of the questions police asked about the apartment. "These are things in a proper police investigation that you're supposed to look at."

He went after the State's cookout next. The SBI, he said, has been interviewing people from that cookout "as recently as a month ago," and they keep being asked whether Miguel was there, and "repeatedly, the people say" he was not. He said investigators pulled cell tower records to try to put the defendant's phone in the area. "Nothing." Then the question he would come back to again and again: "Where's the rest of the evidence?"

He introduced the downstairs neighbor, a woman of about 80 who had lived in the complex since that April. The defense says she stayed up very late that night watching the Democratic National Convention, and that when an officer asked her the next afternoon whether she had heard anything, she wrote in a statement that between 3 and 4 a.m. she heard four loud thumps. Nobody had told her what time mattered, the defense said. She was just asked whether she heard anything. "State says, well, this is just noise," Rainsford said. "Why not address it?"

There is a small, painful echo in that detail. Later in the morning, Faith's niece told the jury that the night before Faith died, late, somewhere around 11 o'clock, Faith texted her out of nowhere to ask whether she was registered to vote. The convention was on that night. The niece said she was, and asked Faith if she was. Faith wrote back, "duh."

A swab nobody tested

This is the watchdog beat of Day 1, and it deserves room.

The defense told the jury that police went back to the apartment on September 10, 2012, three days after Faith died. On the first day, Rainsford said, they had spent their time in the bedroom and "didn't really look much in the bathroom." This time they did. In the spot where Rosario said she had been sitting for those 90 minutes, against the bathroom door frame, there was what he described as "about a two and a half inch blood drip."

Police swabbed it. They ran the presumptive test. It was positive for blood. "There's no dispute what it is," he said.

Stop on that. In a case the State itself describes as built on DNA from the first weeks, with the SBI working it alongside Chapel Hill police for years, a swab of presumptive blood from inside the apartment, collected three days after the killing, was never sent for DNA. Then it disappeared. And according to the defense, it does not show up in a police report until 2025, thirteen years later. "We'll never know what was mixed in with that blood sample," Rainsford told the jury, "because the police lost it."

None of that is proven yet. It is what the defense told the jury it will show, and the State has not answered it in front of them. But it is not a claim that came out of nowhere. Before trial, the defense asked Judge Gregory to dismiss the whole case over the lost bloodstain. According to pretrial press coverage, he denied that motion in August 2026. That is how this usually goes. When the government loses evidence, a defendant generally has to show the loss was in bad faith to get a case thrown out. Without that showing, the usual remedy is the one playing out here: the defense gets to tell the jury about the loss and argue what it means.

So the jury is now the only body left to weigh it, and here are the questions I want answered on this record. Who collected that swab, and who had it after? Why was presumptive blood from the room where the State's own timeline places a witness for 90 minutes never sent for testing, in 2012 or in any of the nine years that followed? When did anyone first notice it was gone? And why, if the defense is right, does it first appear in a report in 2025?

Notice something else. That swab could have helped the State as easily as the defense. If it held only Faith's blood, or nobody's DNA at all, it would have closed a door the defense is now walking straight through. Lost evidence does not hurt one side. It hurts the truth, and it hands the doubt to whoever is willing to argue it. On Day 1, that was the defense.

It was not the only handling question the defense raised. Rainsford told the jury that crime scene technicians did not get into the apartment until about 3:30 that afternoon, after hours of officers going in and out. He said Faith's body was not moved until around midnight, and that nobody can say how many times or in what ways it was moved. He said one of the lead investigators took Faith's phone to look through it, so that now only two small spots on it could be tested for DNA, "because the evidence was mishandled." He listed things he says were never tested at all: the inside of the front doorknob, and Faith's hands. And he told the jury that crime scene photos will show at least one technician at the scene without gloves. "What's getting tested is only as good as the way it's collected, the way that it's handled, the chain of custody." A chain of custody is the paper trail that shows who had a piece of evidence at every moment from the scene to the lab. A gap in it is an open door for doubt.

Who, but not when

Then Rainsford turned to the science, and this is where the case will be won or lost.

Start with the bottle the State calls the murder weapon. The defense's first point is that it was not brought in from outside. "This is a bottle that had been in the apartment for weeks." His second point is about what is on it. "96% of the DNA mixture on this bottle that was tested at the time was from" Faith. The rest, less than 4%, is the part the State says is the defendant's, and Rainsford told the jury the State's own SBI analyst "is not going to say, yeah, this was his DNA."

That needs a plain-English explanation, because it will be the heart of the trial. When DNA from more than one person is mixed together, an analyst usually does not get a clean match. She compares two stories, called hypotheses, and calculates how much more likely the mixture is under one story than the other. That gives you a number, a likelihood ratio, and those numbers can be enormous. The defense's complaint is about the stories the analyst chose. It says the comparison was Faith and the defendant against two unknown, unrelated people. "Why not run it against Faith Hedgepeth, my client, hypothetical two, Faith Hedgepeth, and an unknown unrelated individual?" Faith's DNA is obviously going to be on that bottle. Leave her out of one side of the comparison, the defense says, and of course the number gets bigger. The defense also says multiple markers, the points an analyst compares in a DNA profile, were missing.

Then he named the trap. A big number about a DNA profile is not a number about guilt. "If you think when you hear DNA results, and you hear big numbers ... and you jump to the conclusion, well, it must be 10 trillion times more likely this person committed the crime than someone else. That's what we in the legal profession call the prosecutor's fallacy." He was careful to add that the State "did not do that." He is warning the jury not to do it for them.

And then the line that carries the defense's whole theory. Finding DNA in a mixture, or even a match, "does not mean that the persons who contributed the DNA left it there [at] a specific time and place."

That is the "who but not when" problem, and the State put its own finger on it first. A profile on a bottle can tell you who touched it. It cannot, on its own, tell you when, or how, or whether that touch had anything to do with a killing. Combine that with the State's own admission that it may never show the jury what set off the rage, and you see the exact shape of this trial. The State is asking twelve people to let DNA answer who, and to let who answer everything else.

The defense laid out the rest of the forensic list the same way, item by item:

The rum bottle, Rainsford said, was tested at one small spot for 13 years. The rest of it was swabbed only after the defense asked, and those results were "not connected to the defendant." The boxer shorts were re-sampled in 2021 and showed, in his words, "a mixture of multiple, multiple people," with only some markers in common with his client and "most of them" missing. The paper bag with the note carries DNA from several people. And he told the jury the State's opening got the tampon wrong. "That's not the evidence," he said. He told them there were two profiles on it, that the one full profile excluded his client, and that the other produced no conclusion at all, and he said an SBI analyst will testify that no conclusion means no conclusion.

He also went to the autopsy. Two doctors in the room, he said, and "absolutely no physical evidence whatsoever" of the injuries the State's account of the attack would lead a jury to expect. He told the jury the medical evidence, including a low lung weight, indicates Faith most likely died within seconds of her injuries, which cuts against the State's picture of her left "dead or still dying." And he read the jury passages from a 2024 U.S. Department of Justice protocol for forensic medical exams, which says biological evidence can be collected up to five days or more afterward. That is a rule written to help living victims. His argument is that the same science cuts the other way in a courtroom: if that kind of evidence can last for days, then finding it does not fix the hour it was left. "Time frames matter," he said.

Here is where I come down on all of it, as of Day 1. These are promises. They are specific, they are checkable, and they will be checked, because the State's DNA analysts have to take the stand. The State told the jury there is "one single solitary male DNA profile everywhere." The defense told the jury that 96% of the weapon's DNA is Faith's and that the full profile on one key item excluded the defendant. Those two openings cannot both be fully right. Somebody made a promise to this jury that the lab witnesses will either keep or break, and we will hold both sides to what they said on October 7.

One more thing the jury will not hear. The State said police "ran out of circles" and then "found the defendant in 2021." It did not say how. According to court documents reported in the press before trial, investigators used genetic genealogy and then took a DNA sample from the defendant without his knowledge during a 2021 traffic stop. Judge Gregory excluded the genealogy evidence before trial. That ruling may well be right under the law, but it means the jury hears "we found him" with the mechanics removed.

The arrest, and an objection that came after the words

Rainsford finished with the arrest. He told the jury police decided ahead of time that they were going to arrest his client, and that when they approached him, an investigator held up a picture on an iPhone and said something like, do you know this girl, she was killed a couple of years ago in Chapel Hill. Not a proper photograph. Not her name. Not the year. "Nine years later, you approach somebody. You don't have a big glossy photograph." If showing people photographs is so important to jog memories, he asked, why not here?

Then he told the jury police interviewed several of his client's ex-girlfriends, asking whether he was violent. The State objected. He kept going: "You'll hear testimony from several ex-girlfriends. No issues. None." More objections. The court sustained them, which the judge confirmed later on the record.

He closed on the forensic question and the word. "No forced entry. No window broken, no door kicked in." And then: "Ask yourself, is this noise? Is it just DNA and the rest is noise? Or are there things in this case that don't add up?" He asked for a "verdict of non-guilty," and the jury went to the morning recess.

Now go back to the instruction I asked you to hold onto. When the court sustains an objection, the jury must disregard any answer given. But "No issues. None." was not an answer to a question. It was spoken in an opening, the objection came after the words were out, and when the jury left, the State told the judge on the record that "there wasn't a motion to strike, and I think we're beyond that at this point. I certainly don't want to bring it to the jury's attention further."

I understand that choice. Telling twelve people to forget something can make them remember it harder. But the State's own position is that prior good conduct would not be proper evidence, and the jury heard it anyway, never specifically told to set it aside. A sustained objection cannot unring a bell. The question for the rest of this trial is whether the court keeps the defense inside the lines it has drawn, and whether it holds the State to the same standard when the State's own openings go further than its evidence.

WATCH: DAY 1 TOP MOMENTS Faith Hedgepeth Murder Trial Day 1 Top Moments / Evidence or Noise

The fence around the roommate

When the jury was out after the morning recess, the State put two matters on the record, and the second one tells you how this trial is going to be fought.

First, the sustained objections and the warning about prior good conduct. Second, the court's order on what lawyers call third-party guilt, the argument that someone other than the defendant committed the crime. The State reminded the court that the order specifically barred the defense from suggesting that Karena Rosario wrote the note on the bag. It said the defense opening, without naming her, had still implied that someone other than the defendant wrote it. If the defense tries to elicit that testimony, the State said, it will object.

Rainsford answered that lawyers on both sides usually hold their fire during openings, and that the State had broken that rule in its own favor. "Repeatedly, the state said that my client wrote the note on the back. Didn't object." He called the State's claim "speculative," and said he would object "at the proper time." The judge noted both positions and made no new ruling.

I want to be careful and fair here. Karena Rosario is a witness. She is not charged with anything, and the court has ruled the defense may not argue otherwise. Nothing in this article suggests she is responsible for anything that happened to Faith.

But Rainsford's point deserves a hearing on its own terms, because it is about the State's burden, not about her. The State told the jury, as a fact, that the defendant wrote that note. So far, what the State has described is his DNA on the bag. DNA on a paper bag is evidence that someone touched a paper bag. It is not, by itself, evidence of who held a pen. The order bars the defense from pointing the jury at another writer. It does not lift the State's burden to prove its own claim. If the State intends to prove authorship, through handwriting, through something found at the scene, through anything at all, the jury has not heard it yet. That is a promise to watch.

Faith, before the crime scene

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 2, ALEXIS EVANS Faith Hedgepeth Murder Trial: Her Niece Testifies Faith Never Mentioned a Miguel / Pt 2

The State's first witness was not a detective or a lab analyst. It was Alexis Evans, Faith's niece, and the choice was deliberate. Before the jury ever sees the bedroom, the State wanted it to meet the person.

Evans spelled her own name for the record, and then she spelled Faith's: Faith Danielle Hedgepeth. Her mother, Rolanda Hedgepeth, is Faith's older sister, and the families lived close together in one small community, three girls playing outside in the nineties, making up dances to songs.

She described Faith as "really academically gifted," a cheerleader, National Honor Society, tribal youth groups, the church choir. "A lot of people describe her as having a very bubbly personality," Evans said, but she reached for something bigger. Faith had "a very big gravitational pull where people always wanted to be around her." Friendship meant a lot to her. "Sisterhood meant a lot to her."

She told a story to show who Faith was when someone she loved got hurt. On a family trip to Myrtle Beach, walking back along the strip, a girl sitting against a wall flipped off Evans's little sister. Evans turned and saw Faith already "headed back over there to confront" her. Two cousins went and brought her back. It is a small story, and it was meant to be. The State is showing the jury a protector.

Faith started at UNC in the summer of 2010, through a transition program called Summer Bridge, right after high school. "UNC Chapel Hill had always been her first choice." Her father had gone there for about a year and left, Evans said, and Faith wanted to finish what he started. She studied biology. "She wanted to be a pediatrician." She wanted to work with kids.

The last time Evans saw her was "the Sunday before she was killed." Faith surprised the family by coming home for her mother's birthday, Evans's grandmother's. "Karena was with her," Evans said. The following Friday, visitors came to the door and told them Faith was dead. There were three vigils, she said: at the tribe's powwow, at Faith's high school, and at UNC.

Near the end came the one question aimed at the case. "Did Faith ever say anything to you about a Miguel?" "No." The State showed the jury State's Exhibit 1, a photograph of Faith at a shared birthday celebration in 2011, accepted without objection for illustrative purposes, which means the jury may use it to understand the testimony. The court offered the defense its cross-examination. Rainsford asked nothing, and Evans was released.

That was the right call by the defense. You do not cross-examine a grieving niece about her aunt's character when your whole case is about a lab. On the charges, Evans moved the needle almost not at all. Faith not mentioning a Miguel to her niece is a thin negative; the State's theory is that she never knew him. But on the jury's sense of who Faith was, Evans did exactly what she was called to do. Twelve people now carry a person into the rest of this trial, and the State will lean on that weight every time a scientist talks about percentages.

With the jury sent to lunch, the State flagged its next witness, Rosario, and a set of police photographs taken of her on September 8, 2012. The State said they were taken to document injuries, "of which there were none," and asked that one of them not be shown by the media because of privacy concerns. The defense did not object. The judge ordered that when that exhibit is offered, the media "respectfully not" show or broadcast it. That photograph became State's Exhibit 21, and we will not show or describe it.

One entrance, one key

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 3, KARENA ROSARIO: THE NIGHT AND THE DISCOVERY, LIVE OCT 8, 1:00 PM ET Faith Hedgepeth Murder Trial: Roommate Testifies She Came Home to an Unlocked Door / Pt 3

After lunch, the State called Karena Rosario, and special prosecutor Lisa Coltrain took her through the direct examination for the rest of the afternoon. A direct examination is the friendly questioning by the side that called the witness. The defense's cross-examination, the hostile questioning, waits for Day 2.

She is 34 now. She lives in New Jersey, where she grew up, works remotely in healthcare, and graduated from UNC in 2016 with a degree in psychology. She picked Chapel Hill out of a college guidebook, knowing nobody in North Carolina. She met Faith through a suite-mate in the Hinton James freshman dorm, and they "kind of became best friends."

She said Faith quickly felt like a sister. They ate together, studied together (or meant to, "I wish we studied more"), and went to Myrtle Beach together, which is State's Exhibit 2, admitted without objection.

Then the State walked her, photograph by photograph, into the apartment. Exhibits 3 through 12 are aerial views, the building, the door, a diagram, and pictures of the living room, kitchen and bathroom, almost all offered for illustrative purposes and none drawing a defense objection. The details the State drew out are the ones its theory needs. The complex had "only one entrance." Her building was the last one, "all the way down the right," with a "dead end" beyond it. Unit 1502 was upstairs.

In the summer of 2012, she testified, she lived there with her then-boyfriend, Takoy Jones. The relationship "became abusive," she said, and around July she got a restraining order and he moved out. The bathroom had no door, and she told the jury why: "During an argument with my ex, he knocked down the bathroom door." Jones did not testify. He is not charged with anything in this case, and nothing in the record suggests he had any part in what happened to Faith. The State brought this out for one reason, I think: so that a doorless bathroom is explained before the defense can make anything of it.

Faith moved in around the end of July or the start of August, when her own lease ran out. Money was tight; she was working long hours at a restaurant job. One bedroom, one queen mattress, Faith on the left by the window. A messy apartment with "two apartments worth of stuff" in it. "I felt like we were just surviving at the time," Rosario said. They never argued about money, she said, or school, or cleaning. "It was like our chaos, but we could always find what we needed."

And one key. That fact will carry weight for the rest of this trial.

She said Faith did not bring men to the apartment; the only one she could think of was a man Faith had been seeing that spring and summer. Then the State asked about something small that turns out not to be small. A couple of days before Faith died, a friend had given Rosario a breakfast biscuit from a Chapel Hill late-night spot. She took a couple of bites, put it back in the bag, and left it by her nightstand. Was there any writing on that bag? "There was not." The State did not connect the dots out loud, and did not have to. The bag with the note on it is a white paper food bag with a partly eaten sandwich inside. If the bag by the nightstand had no writing on it before that night, then by the State's account, whoever wrote the note wrote it that night.

Thursday night, September 6

She napped most of that Thursday. Around 8 p.m., Faith drove them to Davis Library to study; Rosario had papers to write. At some point Faith realized she had left a textbook at the apartment and went back for it. She was gone for about an hour. When Rosario finally reached her by phone, Faith said "she had forgotten the key, and so she wasn't able to get in the apartment and she was on the phone with someone."

On the phone with someone. The jury did not hear who. Neither side said on Day 1. It is a few hours before Faith died, she was outside a locked door, and she was talking to a person the record has not yet named. Phone records exist; Rosario testified she gave police her phone, and the defense says investigators took Faith's. I am not suggesting that call means anything. I am saying it is a gap in the timeline of the last night of Faith's life, and a gap in a timeline is exactly the kind of thing this jury will be asked to call noise or not noise. I want to know who she was talking to, and I suspect the jury does too.

When Faith came back, they decided to go out. A Latin night had a cover charge, so they went to The Thrill first, because it was free. They got ready together around midnight, Faith doing Rosario's hair. Rosario wore one of Faith's tops that night (State's Exhibit 13).

At The Thrill, Rosario drank red slushies made with tequila "and then shots." Faith had "maybe one or two drinks." They saw people they knew from school, including Jordan McCrary, then a UNC soccer player and a good friend. Late in the night, the cousin of her ex-boyfriend came in handing out flyers for a party, and seeing him "brought up a lot of emotion." She had grown close to that family, she said, and she was grieving the whole relationship. She also told the jury, under oath, that she had had an abortion a week earlier and felt she had not gotten the support she needed. By closing time, around 2 or 2:15, "I was just not really okay."

She started crying in the parking garage across the street. And here is the last clear picture she gave the jury of Faith alive: "I just remember her holding my hands, and just telling me everything was gonna be okay."

The bathroom floor

From there, her memory thins, and to her credit, she said so plainly.

She does not remember the drive home. She remembers being half on the bed, leaning over a trash can on her side, Faith's trash can, the one that usually sat in the dining room full of pots and pans. She does not remember moving it there. She rated herself "very intoxicated," and said throwing up was not normal for her. She does not remember what Faith was doing.

Then she went to the bathroom, which she called her "safe space," the place she always went when she fought with her ex. She sat against the wall between the doorway and the toilet, crying and texting three people. One of them, Jordan McCrary, was still up and answering. Around 4 a.m., she asked him to come get her. She does not have clear memories of the texts or the calls.

When he arrived: "I got up off the floor and I walked out." Did she know where Faith was at that moment? "No." She believes she said she was going to stay with Jordan, "something to that effect," and does not remember Faith saying anything back. She took her phone. Did she take the key?

She could not lock the door from the outside without it. She left with McCrary, slept at his place, and woke around 8 or 8:30.

Step back and look at what this block did. For the State, it is the foundation of "someone came in": one entrance, one key, a door left unlocked from the outside after 4 a.m., a roommate gone, Faith alone. For the defense, a witness who calls herself very intoxicated, whose clearest memory is a bathroom floor, and who cannot say where Faith was when she walked out, is a witness whose night will be tested line by line on cross. The defense cannot argue she did anything. It can attack whether her account is solid enough to carry the timeline everything else depends on, and she handed it that material by being honest about what she does not remember.

The unlocked door

She needed her notebooks; she writes her papers by hand and types them later. She knew Faith had a 9 o'clock class, so she started calling and texting, "quite a few times," in something close to a panic, because if Faith had already gone to campus with the only key, Rosario would be locked out. Faith did not answer.

She called Marisol Rangel, an older friend from the Carolina Hispanic Club with "motherly instincts," who tried calling Faith too. No answer. Rangel drove over and took her back to the apartment. In the lot, they saw Faith's car. Rosario asked Rangel to wait in case the door was locked, and Rangel said she would come up to say hi to Faith.

"The door was shut." Was it locked? "It was unlocked."

The bathroom light was on, and she thought maybe Faith was up and getting ready. She went straight to the bedroom for her things. The comforter was off the bed, pushed to the floor on the left side. She saw spots of blood. She walked around the bed, saw Faith's hair, and pulled the comforter down. She told the jury Faith had a black eye, that she was undressed from the waist down with her shirt pushed all the way up, and that there was blood on her arm, on the walls and on the bed. Faith was off the bed, partly on the floor.

Both women grabbed their phones. Rosario got through first, she said, because she kept 911 saved and only had to press one button.

A call the jury has not heard

Then came a moment that went by in under a minute, and that I do not want to let go by.

The State showed Rosario State's Exhibit 14. She identified it as the recording of her 911 call, said she had listened to it, and said it was her voice and accurately reflected the call. Rainsford said, "I have no objection to that." The judge asked whether the State was moving to admit it. The State said yes, but that it was "not asking to publish at this point." Counsel were called to the bench. The feed went silent. When the sound came back, the jury was being sent to the afternoon recess.

No ruling admitting Exhibit 14 was heard on the record. So we are not calling it admitted. And the jury has not heard it.

Think about where that leaves the twelve people in the box. Both sides told them this call matters. The State said in its opening that they would hear Rosario say "she's cold." The defense told them to listen to it "very closely" and ask, "Is this a normal call?" It said that on the call Rosario keeps saying things are out of place, especially "this blue bottle." The jury has now heard about the 911 call from the prosecutor, from the defense lawyer and from the witness. It has not heard the call. Why the State held it back at that moment, and what was said at the bench, happened off our feed, and we will not guess. But the record should show that the call both sides built their openings around had, at the end of Day 1, no ruling heard on it and had not been played.

Two bottles

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 4, KARENA ROSARIO: THE BEDROOM, THE INVESTIGATION, THE STATEMENT, LIVE OCT 8, 3:00 PM ET Faith Hedgepeth Murder Trial: Roommate Says the Kitchen Wine Bottle Was on the Bedroom Floor / Pt 4

When court came back, Coltrain went straight back to the call. Rosario said a woman on the line was asking questions she "wasn't really understanding." She wanted the ambulance. "She asked me if she was warm and asked me to touch her. So I did, and I told them that she felt cold." Waiting "just felt like a thousand hours." She went to the front door, still on the phone, and saw a police car coming down the road. The officer went upstairs, into the bedroom, and "told me that she was gone." She asked if they were still bringing the ambulance. "He just said she was gone."

Then the State went to the details its forensic case will hang on. She believes she touched Faith's arm and her rib cage, hoping to feel her breathing, and does not think she moved anything but the comforter. Faith had on "just a black shirt" pulled up, and nothing else. She always slept in a T-shirt and shorts, Rosario said, and never slept undressed. State's Exhibit 15, the shorts Faith usually slept in, came in with no objection and was allowed; Rosario was not sure whether she saw them in the room that morning. She noticed a used tampon near Faith, and said she knew Faith was on her period.

And she noticed a bottle. A blue wine bottle that normally sat on the kitchen bar was on the bedroom floor at the end of the bed. That is State's Exhibit 16, a photograph of the bottle on the floor, allowed with no objection. Back on the hallway-and-kitchen photo, she marked where two bottles usually stood: the wine bottle, "and then I believe it was like a Bacardi bottle." Both had come into the apartment a couple of weeks earlier, when a friend and Rosario's sister were visiting. Did she see the rum bottle anywhere that morning, in the kitchen or the bedroom? "No."

Then a question that sounds like trivia and is not. Both women were under 21. How did they get alcohol? From older friends, from parties. Did they ever get alcohol from strangers? "No. We didn't need to." The State is closing a door before the defense can open it. If the bottles came from friends, the bottles are no bridge between a stranger and that kitchen.

Lay this next to what the defense told the jury in the morning, and you see the cross coming. The defense said that when Rosario walked the apartment with police on September 8, 2012, she pointed to the blue bottle as out of place and "doesn't mention the rum bottle." On direct, she told the jury she did not see the rum bottle anywhere that morning. Those two accounts may fit together perfectly. A missing bottle is easy to miss in a crowded, messy kitchen the day after the worst morning of your life. But whether they fit is exactly the kind of thing a jury decides on cross-examination, and it will start there.

For the State, the bedroom Rosario described is the bedroom its forensic case needs: a wine bottle out of place, a rum bottle missing, a young woman undressed against her habit. None of it ties the defendant to the apartment. It is the stage the DNA witnesses will need to stand on.

"Too many to count"

The State then took her through the investigation from her side of it. After the officer told her Faith was gone, she remembers sitting in Rangel's car, calling Jordan McCrary and saying, "Oh my god, she's gone," and then sitting at the UNC counseling center waiting for her counselor. She does not remember getting there. "I was in shock."

The next day, she said, Sergeant Matthews of the Chapel Hill Police Department let her walk back through the apartment "because it was such a mess," so she could point out anything out of place. "I just wanted to be helpful." On September 8, 2012, she went to the police department. She sat for an interview, wrote out a list of everyone they had been in contact with, gave a DNA swab and her fingerprints, and handed over her phone. She believes they took her laptop too. "They had access to everything." Did she ever try to stop them? "There was no reason for me to stop them."

She identified State's Exhibit 17, a flash drive with a recording of that interview, and said it accurately depicts her. No offer of that exhibit and no ruling on it were heard on the record. That matters for the same reason the 911 call matters. The defense told the jury in its opening what it says is on that recording: that the officer asked her about a conversation with McCrary about blood on her hand and she said she had no memory of it, and that he asked whether she had used the bathroom sink, where he had seen what he thought might be blood, and she said she had not. Those are the defense's descriptions, made in an opening, not evidence. The jury now knows a recording exists. Whether it will see it, and who will play it, is open.

Police photographed her that same day: her face, her arms, her hands, her stomach, her legs. State's Exhibits 18 through 21 came in with no objection, and the judge again reminded the media not to broadcast Exhibit 21. Asked about injuries to her face, arms, hands and legs, she said no, every time. That is the State answering, in advance, a question it expects the defense to raise.

How many times did she talk to law enforcement after that? "Too many to count." Over the phone, at the station, through the years. "Because I wanted to be helpful and I wanted to know what happened." She never changed her phone number, so anyone with information could always reach her. Then, quietly:

She went home to New Jersey for a year and planned to transfer. On a summer visit, an admissions advisor filed the paperwork to readmit her and handed her a turtle figurine. "I remember leaving that day with the turtle and just crying and just feeling like I was supposed to come back and I was supposed to finish." She came back in fall 2013 and graduated.

She learned of the arrest from a friend who saw it on the news, and then from law enforcement. The State pointed her to the man in the blue suit at the defense table. Did she know him in 2012? No. Does she recognize him at all? No. As far as she knows, was he ever in the apartment? No. Did Faith ever mention anyone named Miguel? "No."

Times from a phone

The last exhibit of the day was State's Exhibit 22, Rosario's five-page handwritten statement from September 8, 2012. The defense said, "I have no objection," and the court allowed it. The jurors got individual paper copies and read them in silence for about seven minutes while the room waited. Nobody in the gallery could see what was on those pages.

Then the State asked the final question of Day 1, and it was a defensive one. Her statement lists very specific times for texts and calls. How did she know them when she wrote it?

So she has no specific memory of what time she made those calls? "No." Just from looking at the phone? "Yes."

That question tells you what the State expects on Day 2. The defense built its whole opening timeline, the 3:05 to 4:20 window, the 90 minutes in the bathroom, on that written statement. By getting Rosario to say the times came from her phone and not her memory, the State took some of the sting out of a cross it knows is coming. You cannot impeach someone with a memory she has already told the jury she does not have.

But notice what else that answer does. It confirms that her own recollection of the hours that matter most is close to empty. The clock of this case is now a phone log, not a person. Phone records do not forget, but they only tell you when a phone did something, not who was in a room. On Day 1 the jury heard nothing about the defense's claim that Faith's phone shows no activity after 4:20 a.m., and nothing about who Faith was on the phone with outside her locked door that evening. Both are questions a phone can answer, if anyone asks it.

When the State sat down, Judge Gregory looked at the defense table. "Mr. Rainsford, instead of starting your cross-examination and interrupting you, I think it's prudent that we go ahead and stop for the day." Neither side objected. The jury was told not to form an opinion, not to watch the news, and to keep wearing comfortable shoes. Rosario stays on the stand. Court resumes at 9:30 a.m. on Day 2.

Where Day 1 leaves the case

The forecasts are over. Every witness from here either tightens the State's forensic chain to a man it says Faith never knew, or widens the gaps in the last hours of September 7, 2012.

My honest read: on what actually came in, the State is modestly ahead. Rosario's direct gave it the unlocked one-key apartment, a bedroom that matches its theory, and a witness who has cooperated for 14 years. Every exhibit the court ruled on went in without a defense objection.

The defense made the more specific promises, and specific promises can be checked. If the State's analysts concede what Rainsford previewed, "just DNA" lands hard. If they do not, the defense spent its credibility on Day 1.

The State's own promise, one single male profile everywhere, will be tested too, and its admission stands: it may never show the jury why.

These are the questions Day 2 and the days after it have to answer:

How far can Rainsford go on cross-examination of Rosario inside the court's third-party-guilt order, and how strictly will the court police that line, for both sides?

Who was Faith on the phone with that evening, locked out of her own apartment, a few hours before she died?

When will the jury hear the 911 call, State's Exhibit 14, and will the recorded police interview, State's Exhibit 17, come in at all?

What will the State's investigators say about the bathroom door-frame swab: who had it, why it was never tested, and when it went missing?

When the first DNA analyst takes the stand, will she agree that 96% of the mixture on the rum bottle is Faith's, will she defend the hypotheses she ran, and what will she say about the tampon?

And beyond the DNA on a paper bag, what evidence will the State offer that the defendant wrote the note it told the jury he wrote?

WATCH: DAY 1 NO BREAKS EDITION, EVERY WORD Faith Hedgepeth Murder Trial Day 1, No Breaks Edition: Openings and Faith's Roommate on the Stand

To judge Day 1 for yourself, the No Breaks Edition has every word with the recesses taken out. Watch the two openings back to back, count how many times each lawyer says "noise," and ask yourself which of them is describing the evidence and which is describing the gaps, because by the end of this trial, the jury will have to decide whether those are two different things.

Faith Hedgepeth held her best friend's hands in a parking garage at 2 in the morning and told her everything was going to be okay. Fourteen years later, twelve strangers are being asked to decide whether one more stranger's DNA tells them what happened after that. The State says the evidence is louder than the noise. The defense says some of the noise is evidence. We will be in that courtroom, every day the jury sits, to hear which one holds.