A Red Smudge, a Door Frame and Fourteen Years: The Roommate's Cross in the Faith Hedgepeth Trial

Faith Hedgepeth was 19. On the morning of September 7, 2012, her best friend and roommate, Karena Rosario, walked back into the apartment they shared in Chapel Hill and found her dead in the bedroom. Fourteen years later, on Thursday, October 8, 2026, a Durham County jury heard about something red on Karena Rosario's finger, from the man who saw it, for the third time across those fourteen years. They heard it on the stand. They heard it on a police recording from 2012. And they heard that he had told police the same thing in a voicemail before anyone ever sat him down.

That small red mark is where I think Day 2 lives. Not because it proves anything. It doesn't, and nobody in that courtroom is allowed to argue that it does. It matters because it sat in the middle of a day full of facts the jury is allowed to hear and not allowed to be given a theory for, and because nobody on Day 2 told the jury whether anyone ever tested it.

Miguel Enrique Salguero-Olivares has pleaded not guilty to the charges in Faith's death. He is presumed innocent. Not one of the Day 2 witnesses who was asked had ever seen him, and not one of them had ever heard Faith or Karena mention anyone named Miguel. The State's case on who did this, by its own account on Day 1, is DNA and prints, and no lab witness has testified yet. Nothing in this article is a finding. It is what was said and shown in open court on Day 2, set side by side, and the questions it leaves on the table.

If you missed the openings and the first afternoon of Karena's testimony, I wrote up Day 1 here. The short version: 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."

Day 2 was where the defense got its turn with the roommate, and where the State took the jury into the bedroom. I've got two questions it leaves open, and I'll come back to both before the end. What was on Karena Rosario's hand when she walked out that door? And why did it take until 2026 for anybody to ask her about a bloodstain right where she was sitting?

WATCH: DAY 2 TOP MOMENTS Day 2 Top Moments / The Car, the Call, the Bedroom

An order that binds the lawyers, and not us

Before the jury came up, defense attorney James Rainsford put the judge's pretrial order on the record. It matters for every word that follows, so here is what it does in plain English.

When a defendant wants to tell a jury that somebody else did it, the law calls that third-party guilt, and a judge decides before trial how much of it the jury gets to hear. In a September 2026 order, Judge Keith O. Gregory granted the State's motion on that question. The defense may not argue that Karena Rosario, or anyone else, killed Faith. But the order carves out a short list of facts the jury will hear anyway, because they are part of the story of that night no matter where they point. Rainsford read the court's words: these matters are "so intrinsically tied to the facts of this case and the events of September 7, 2012" that they can come in "regardless of whether they potentially indicate guilt of a third party."

He read the list. A red spot on Karena's hand, reported by Jordan McCrary, and what she said about it. An area in the car McCrary was driving that early morning, which tested presumptively positive for blood. A bloodstain on the bathroom door frame inside the apartment, which also tested presumptively positive. A tube-top shirt found inside the bedroom where Faith was found, said to have been worn by Karena when she left. The downstairs neighbor, Joy Barker, hearing thumps between 3 and 4 a.m. And Faith's car, with the fuel door open and the gas cap off. Anything beyond that list needs a hearing with the jury out first. The State agreed the reading was right, correcting one letter, and the judge confirmed it.

"Presumptively positive," by the way, means a quick screening test reacted the way it reacts to blood. It is not a confirmation that the stain is human blood, and it says nothing about whose it is.

I want to be careful and clear about something here, because this whole article depends on it. That order binds the parties. It tells the defense what it may argue in front of this jury. It does not bind this channel. We can put the record side by side and ask what it suggests, and that is what we do. What we do not do is say anyone is guilty of anything. Karena Rosario is uncharged. Jordan McCrary is uncharged. Nobody in this article other than the man at the defense table is accused of anything, and he is presumed innocent. Every question below is anchored to something said in that courtroom.

The gap

The judge laid out the day for the jury, and then Rainsford stood up. He did not come at her hard. He went at the gap.

She and Faith got home from a club called the Thrill somewhere around 2:30 or 2:40 in the morning, by her best estimate, and she got sick in the bedroom. How long between walking in and getting sick? She could not say. She was not looking at the clock. Then he put her own handwritten statement in front of her, State's Exhibit 22, and cleared up its date on the way. On direct, it had been offered as a September 8 statement. She agreed she signed it on September 7, the day Faith was found.

In it she wrote that Faith tried to help her when she threw up, that Faith was in the bedroom, and that she went into the bathroom and sat on the floor crying. So when she got sick, Faith was in the bedroom with her? Yes. And after she went into the bathroom, no further communication with Faith? No. The first text she could see on her phone from the bathroom floor was around 3:30. She could not say exactly how long she had been there before that.

That is the frame the defense wanted. The last time anyone puts Faith alive in this story, she is in the bedroom with Karena. Everything between that moment and 3:30 rests on a phone log, not a memory.

Fifty minutes on the floor

Then Rainsford made the time on the bathroom floor feel long. Close to fifty minutes, by the phone. In all that time, she never rinsed her mouth, never got a sip of water, never washed her hands?

"I was drunk," she said. "I wasn't thinking to look presentable for anybody. I was home."

He moved to the question underneath. The bathroom had no door. The bedroom door should have been open. Faith, the friend she had called the kindest soul she ever met, had fetched a trash can and helped her be sick. Did Faith never come the few feet to check on her? No. She was facing the sink and the tub, she said, and was not paying attention to whether Faith came and went.

Her reason was natural, and specific. If a friend got up to sit alone and cry, she would not follow her in either. The bathroom is small. Faith already knew what she was upset about. "I think she was giving me space," she said. "I mean, she did enough." She got her a trash can and helped her throw up.

The trash can she had been sick into was still in the bedroom the next morning. Wasn't that odd, a can of vomit left by the bed? The apartment was a mess, she said, cleaning was nobody's priority, and Faith may have thought she would need it again. Hold onto that trash can. It came back late in the afternoon, on the State's own photograph.

Then he read the next lines of her statement aloud. Jordan called at 4:21 to say he was in the complex. She got off the floor, did not go back into the bedroom, closed the door and left. She took only her phone. No change of clothes, no backpack, with an 11 o'clock class and a noon class ahead of her. She had left clothes at Jordan's before, she said, and in college you go out, stay over and come back in the morning.

Here is what I noticed about this stretch. Every question built a picture, one inference at a time, without ever stating it, and every answer supplied an ordinary reason. Drunk. Upset. In a hurry. Used to staying over. The defense cannot tell the jury what that picture means. The jury is just holding it.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 5, THE ROOMMATE CROSS-EXAMINED Roommate Says No One Asked About the Bloodstain Until 2026

The X by the door frame

This is the part that got me.

Before trial, in her meetings with the district attorney's office, Karena marked an X on a diagram for where she sat on that bathroom floor. Rainsford put it to her: it was right by the interior door frame of the bathroom, between the toilet and the door, on a short wall. "In the diagram we were shown, it was by the door frame," she said. Then prosecutors showed her photographs of a bloodstain on that same door frame.

And then the question. Before the district attorney's office showed her those photographs, had anyone in law enforcement ever asked her about that stain? "No."

Think about what that means. The order Rainsford read that same morning says the stain tested presumptively positive for blood in 2012. On Day 1, the defense told the jury in its opening that the swab from that door frame was never sent for testing and then could not be found. The person who spent close to an hour sitting right beside it, by her own account, was not asked about it by police in fourteen years. The first people to ask were the prosecutors getting ready for this trial.

I don't know the answer to that, and I want to be fair: maybe there is one. Maybe an investigator will take the stand and explain why that stain was swabbed, why the swab was never tested, where it went, and why nobody put it to the one witness who was sitting next to it. That is the testimony I am waiting for. But on Day 2, the jury heard the question and did not hear an answer, and I have to question how an investigation goes that long without asking.

And understand who that failure hurts. A stain that was never tested cannot point at anyone, including the man on trial. If it was Karena's own blood from something ordinary, a test would have said so and taken the question off the table for her years ago. If it was Faith's, or someone else's, that would matter too. Lost evidence does not hurt one side. It hurts the truth.

"If that is the conversation we had"

From the door frame, Rainsford went straight to the thing Jordan McCrary had said about her that night. In the car, on the way to his place, he saw what looked like blood on her hand. Did she remember that conversation?

No. She remembered Sergeant Rodney Matthews asking her about it in her September 8, 2012 interview. She did not remember the talk in the car itself. But she did not call him a liar. "I trust him. I don't see him to be a liar," she said, "and I told the investigators the same, that if that is the conversation we had, that's a conversation we had."

Did she believe it was blood? "No." Did she tell him she had been throwing up red slushies all night? "No, but I don't have an explanation for that." There was nothing that night, she said, that would have caused her to come into contact with blood, "so I deduced it to my vomit."

Rainsford tied it back to the bathroom floor. Close to an hour with vomit on your hand, and you never washed it? When you've been sick, she said, the smell is everywhere. She wasn't thinking about where it was on her body.

He asked why the bathroom at all, with a couch and blankets in the living room. The bathroom door was missing because her ex-boyfriend had broken it down. It was still her safe space, she said, it always had been, and it was beside the toilet if she needed to be sick again. I'll note what the record says about him and nothing more: he is not charged with anything, he has not testified, and the door came up only as the reason it was gone.

The rum bottle and the tube top

On Day 1, the State told the jury the Bacardi rum bottle was the weapon and that the defendant's DNA was on it. Karena testified it normally sat on the kitchen bar, and that she never saw it that morning. Rainsford pointed out that when she walked the apartment with Sergeant Matthews on the evening of September 8, for about an hour, with the whole point of showing him anything out of place or missing, she never mentioned the rum bottle.

"I wasn't gonna mention every little thing that might have been moved in my apartment," she said. She had just lost her friend. She was in shock, looking for things that were plainly where they did not belong, like the blue wine bottle on the bedroom floor, not taking an inventory of a crowded counter.

That answer matters to the defense for a reason that has nothing to do with Karena. If nobody can say when the rum bottle left the counter, the DNA on it is harder to pin to that night. The defense opening already told the jury the bottle had been in the apartment for weeks.

Then the tube top, which Rainsford had been walking toward all morning. In 2012 she told police more than once that she left the tube top she wore that night at Jordan's. She came home the next morning in a purple shirt she had left there before. And the tube top she told police she left at Jordan's? That was Faith's shirt. "Yes, it was." They shared clothes. She leaves things everywhere, she said. She honestly believed it was at Jordan's.

Police later told her where it was found. "I was told it was located in the bedroom." Did she have any idea how it got there? "I have no idea." And then she said something I believed: when they told her, she felt really bad, because police had torn apart Jordan's room looking for it.

Her statement also says she texted Faith at 8:48 that morning about her notebook and folder, and then, by her own written count, called Faith fourteen times between 8:46 and 10:13 with no answer. Fourteen calls in about ninety minutes, Rainsford said, is a lot. Not for her, she answered. If anything it was light.

He put the notes of her May 1, 2026 meeting with prosecutors in front of her. They record that she did not remember saying "Faith, I'm leaving" on her way out. Her answer was the longest of the morning and the most human. For the first couple of years, she said, it was on her mind every single day. "And at a point your brain starts to protect itself," she said. You start to shut things down. You try not to remember.

That gave Rainsford what he came for, and he took it plainly. Would she agree that what she wrote in 2012 is "a more accurate recollection of what happened" than things she thought about down the road? "Yes."

Fourteen years will do that to anybody, and I believe her on that. But notice what it does to the record. The defense now has the State's own witness telling the jury that her 2012 statement beats her memory, and the 2012 statement is the one that says she never went back into the bedroom before she left.

Defense Exhibit 1, and the State's repair

Near the end of the cross, Rainsford marked a document for identification only, which means the jury does not get it as evidence. Defense Exhibit 1 is the report of an interview two SBI agents did with Karena on the UNC campus on October 21, 2013. In it, she told the agents she was outside by herself before Jordan arrived.

"That's not correct," she said. His car was already there. She did not remember the interview. She had been stopped between classes, emotional, after so many interviews and so many questions she did not understand. "I can't say anything with 100% certainty," she said.

Then Lisa Coltrain stood up on redirect for the State and used the same 2013 report to make the opposite point. Further down, Karena had told the agents about some Hispanic men. Those, she explained, were neighbors who lived in the building across the parking lot, people she would see all the time. She had been interviewed countless times, she said, three or four hours at a stretch, with questions that changed without explanation.

On the red mark, the State rebuilt her account. She saw no blood anywhere that night. "I was drinking red slushies all night and I was vomiting," she said, "so the only plausible thing I could think of was my vomit." She did not remember seeing any stain on the door frame while she sat there.

Then the State put the photographs of the crowded kitchen bar back on the screen and asked one question: when police walked her through the apartment, did she know "what the murder weapon was"? The defense objected. Overruled. No, she said. She had no reason to think the rum bottle mattered, and she would not have noticed it gone.

That was a good redirect, and I'll say so. On the rum bottle and the men across the lot, the State took the sting out. It did not go near the door frame. On re-cross, Rainsford kept it short, and Karena Rosario was released after nearly two days on the stand.

The library hour

If you remember Day 1, the defense made a lot of the stretch on the evening of September 6 when Faith left the library where she and Karena were studying, and Karena said Faith had been on the phone with someone. The State's next witness filled that hour in.

Taalib Cochrane is 34 now and lives in Georgia. He met Faith about two weeks into their first semester at UNC in the fall of 2010, in the Hinton James dorm. "She was an amazing individual," he said, "very kind and sweet, caring, compassionate, one of a kind." He said Faith and Karena were so close you rarely saw one without the other.

He and Faith had grown close beyond friendship over time. It was never exclusive. That evening she texted him from the library about earrings she had left at his Rams Village apartment, came by to get them, and stayed an hour or two. They were briefly intimate, and she told him she was on her period. They talked a few minutes more. She said she was going back to the library to study. "When she was leaving," he said, "her last words to me were, I love you." He never saw her again.

After her death, police came to him. They photographed him, downloaded his phone, took his fingerprints and swabbed him for DNA. He had never seen the defendant, the man in the light blue suit at the defense table, and never heard Faith mention a Miguel.

Why does the State put a witness like this up early? Because a DNA case has to account for every innocent source of DNA before it can ask a jury to trust the guilty one. Cochrane's swab and what Faith told him that evening are exactly the kind of facts a DNA case has to explain, and the State put them on the record itself rather than wait for the defense to do it. The defense asked him nothing.

The doorman

After the morning break, the State called the man Karena called "Mitch" on Day 1. Ervin Mitchell ran an event staffing and security company in 2012 that worked the door at the Thrill. He knew Faith and Karena through mutual friends. Every witness so far has described the two of them the same way, best friends, never one without the other, but Mitchell gave Faith a role nobody had named yet. "I would consider Faith to be more of like their protector," he said. She was the one who politely told anyone who came up to them that they were all set.

Were they ever a worry for security? "Zero percent."

He remembered the night because of what came after. He greeted them at the door, gave them the wristbands the Thrill handed out to its VIPs, and saw them leave at closing. Faith drank very little, he said, and Karena had a few, though nothing that would have made security step in. Put that beside Karena's own account of being sick for close to an hour and it doesn't quite line up, but a doorman sees people at the door, not at 3 a.m. He also remembered one man who came up to them over the night, and said it was nothing that drew security's attention. That man was never identified in court.

Then, unprompted, he said something about the investigation that I wrote down. He had gone in to help Chapel Hill police narrow down the times on the Thrill's surveillance video. "I was very helpful," he said, "but it was just a bad experience with the Chapel Hill police, unfortunately." They were rude, he said, and questioned him as if he were involved. That is one witness's experience, and the jury can weigh it. But the defense's whole case on the 2012 investigation is that it was not run the way it should have been, and here was a State witness volunteering his own complaint about it.

Then the jury saw the night. State's Exhibit 23, the Thrill's door-camera footage on a jump drive, came in for illustrative purposes, meaning it helps explain a witness's testimony, and with no sound on it, Mitchell stood by the screen and narrated. For the first time in this trial, the jury watched Faith alive, on the last night of her life, walking into a club with her best friend.

In the closing-time clip, he pointed out Karena at the door in a "tube style shirt" with shorts. "It seems as if like Karena and Faith had planned their outfits together that night," he said. The camera's clock read about 2:07 a.m. on September 7, 2012. He could not vouch for the clock to the minute, but "it aligns with 2 o'clock exit."

He did not know the defendant. Did he recognize the man at the defense table in the light blue jacket? "Only through what has been said online." The defense asked him one question, whether that night was the first time he met Faith. He didn't think so.

Three tellings

Then the State called Jordan McCrary, and this is the witness I think the jury will carry out of Day 2.

He is 33 now and lives in Seattle. He came to UNC in the spring of 2011 on a soccer scholarship and met Faith and Karena in a campus cafeteria. He was closer to Karena. "I'd say it was kind of like a dating, kind of like on and off kind of thing," he said.

That night he was at the Thrill too. Leaving, he texted Karena, a little pointedly, that if she was going home with another man she could come get her things from his place. Her reply was waiting when he got home: he didn't know what she had been through, the man was just a friend, and she had been "hit and abused." He hadn't known. He apologized, told her he was there for her, and went to bed.

Around 4 a.m. she called, upset, and asked him to come get her. He had never been to the apartment. She talked him in by phone. When he turned the car around, she was already outside, and she got in.

And then, on the State's own direct examination, a few seconds into the drive, she was rubbing at her fingers. "She had said that she doesn't know why there's blood on her finger," he testified, "and I asked, like, why do you have blood on your finger, and she just said, I don't know." He looked. "I did see like a little smudge spot." How big? "Smaller than like maybe like a thumbprint." It looked red. He saw no other marks on her, nothing on her clothes. She was upset, "a bit dramatic," but not crying, and mostly texting a friend.

WATCH: THE RED SMUDGE, PUBLIC NOW 'Why Do You Have Blood on Your Finger?' The Roommate's Red Smudge

He left for a 9 a.m. class the next morning. She called during it, and then texted that Faith was dead. When he talked to her later that day, he said, she told him "there was blood everywhere." The prosecutor slowed him down on that one, because it could be heard two ways. When, in her account, did she see blood everywhere? When she got back to the apartment the next day and walked in, he said. She said nothing about blood before she left with him. That was the State being careful, and it was right to be. "Blood everywhere" is the scene she found, not something she described at 4 in the morning.

At the scene that day, an investigator he remembered as "Detective Britt" took him aside, went through his night and looked through his phone. After that he called police himself and left a voicemail, and then he was invited to the station to give a recorded statement.

State's Exhibit 24 is that statement, on a flash drive, and here is a detail I want you to notice. It is not the whole interview. McCrary agreed portions had been cut out. Rainsford stood up and said it sounded as if "bits and pieces have been cut from an interview," but that if it was only for illustrative purposes, he had no objection. The judge let it in on that basis, and the jury watched about sixteen or seventeen minutes of a much younger Jordan McCrary in a police interview room.

On the tape, he tells the detective the same story. The same text about being hit. The same call. And the same small moment: early in the drive, with the car's interior light on, she looked at her finger and said she didn't know why she had blood on it. "Not much at all," he says on the tape. "Not even a thumbprint." Just a small smudge.

Then the cross, and it took about three minutes, all aimed at one thing. Did police come to his house once looking for a tube top? Yes, once. And before that recorded interview, hadn't he left a voicemail for Investigator Johnnie Britt, because police had told him to call if he remembered anything? Yes. And in that voicemail he told police he saw blood on Karena's hand, and that she herself had called it blood? Yes, and yes. Had anything changed in his mind between that voicemail, the tape the jury had just watched, and his testimony on the stand? No.

The defense didn't need to shake him. It needed to make him permanent, and it did. The jury now has that red smudge from three points in time: a voicemail in 2012, before he was ever interviewed; a recorded police interview in 2012; and live testimony fourteen years later. It never moved.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 6, THE DOORMAN AND THE FRIEND Jury Hears Friend's 2012 Tape About the Roommate's Red Smudge

Side by side

Now let me do what this channel does, and what the order does not stop us from doing. Let me put these things next to each other and ask.

On one side, a friend who has told the same account three times across fourteen years: a small red smudge on one finger, smaller than a thumbprint, seen within seconds of picking her up, and she said herself she did not know why there was blood on it. On the other side, Karena, who does not remember that conversation, does not call him a liar, and says the only explanation she can come up with is her own vomit, from the red slushies she drank all night. On cross she said she had no explanation. On redirect she said vomit was the only plausible one. Those two answers can live together. She drank red drinks; she just never told him so in the car.

And then, late in the afternoon, the State's own evidence technician put a photograph on the screen that speaks to her side of it. State's Exhibit 28 shows the inside of the trash can by the bed, the one Karena was sick into. Tamika Price described it as "red slushy-looking vomit." That is Karena's account of the night, on the State's exhibit.

So does that trash can explain the finger? It might. It does not settle it. A red mark from a red drink and a red mark from blood look a lot alike in the dome light of a car at 4 in the morning, and that is exactly why the question that matters is the one nobody answered on Day 2. Was it ever tested? Did anybody swab Karena's hands that morning? Did anybody test the area of McCrary's car that the order says screened presumptively positive for blood, and if they did, what did it show? The jury has not been told. If the answers exist, they are in a lab file somewhere, and they would end this question one way or the other.

Then add the door frame. A stain that screened positive, right where she says she sat, swabbed and, by the defense's account, never tested and then lost, and never put to her by police until the DA's office did it in 2026. And the tube top, Faith's shirt by Karena's own account, which she told police she left at Jordan's, found in the bedroom where Faith was found.

I am not saying Karena Rosario did anything. She is not charged. The court has ruled the defense cannot argue she did it, and I am not arguing it either. But I can put four facts side by side and ask whether the people investigating this case in 2012 ran every one of them to the end. Because if they did, there should be paper showing it, and if they didn't, that is a failure that has been sitting in the middle of this case for fourteen years, and it hurts everyone in that courtroom, the defendant included. The jury is now holding four facts it was allowed to hear and no theory it is allowed to be given. A watchdog's job is to ask what the record never answered. This one never answered whether anyone tested that finger.

The call

After lunch the State called Linda Holp, a retired Durham 911 call-taker, who spelled her last name for the court reporter "as in puppy." She was working the morning of September 7, 2012, and the prosecutor handed her State's Exhibit 14, "what's been previously marked and admitted," the recording of the 911 call she took. The only change, she said, was that the caller's phone number had been removed.

That phrase answered a question I asked at the end of Day 1, when I wrote that the jury had not heard the 911 call and that the ruling on Exhibit 14 was never clearly heard on the record. The State described it on Day 2 as already admitted, the defense did not dispute it, and it was published without objection.

Then the jury heard Karena's voice from that morning, at twenty years old, instead of her memory of it fourteen years on. She is panicked. Holp is the steady one. Is she breathing? "I don't think so. I don't think so." Is she on her back or her stomach? "I think she fell off the bed." Holp told her to go to Faith and touch her, and asked what she felt. Does she feel warm? "No, she feels cold. She feels cold."

And from that moment, the instructions changed. "Don't touch anything else." Then, later: "You don't touch anything else in the room." Leave the room, go to the living room, make sure the door is unlocked so the police and the medics can get in, sit on the couch and stay on the line. She gives her name, Karena Rosario, and her age, twenty. And near the end: "I see the police."

The defense asked Linda Holp nothing, and I think that was right. The call does nothing to the question of who. What it does, for the State, is put a young woman's real shock in front of the jury in her own voice. And it shows one more thing worth holding for later: by the time police came through that door, a 911 call-taker had, properly, sent the person who found Faith back to her and had her touch her. That is ordinary, and it is also the first moment the scene's integrity starts to matter. Day 1's defense opening promised to put the handling of that scene on trial.

WATCH: THE 911 CALL CLIP Jury Hears the Roommate's 911 Call, 'There's Blood Everywhere'

The third friend

Marisol Rangel is 37 now and lives in western North Carolina. She met Karena first, when Karena wandered by mistake into a planning meeting of the Carolina Hispanic Association, and through Karena she met Faith. She was a year or two older, not quite the mom of the group, but the one who sometimes reined them in.

She drew the three of them better than anyone has. Faith was "really goofy," she said. "She had a lot of joy. She gave like big hugs to everyone and just kind of made you feel seen." Karena "was more quiet, more soft, more meek," funny once you were close enough. They cooked together at the apartment, because Faith was a good cook. Faith and Karena were "really close, honestly like sisters."

Her bartending shift was canceled the night of September 6, and she went home to her boyfriend then, her husband now, Christian Wilson. In the morning she found texts from Karena she had slept through. Later, Karena could not reach Faith and asked her to try. She couldn't either. So it was Marisol, not Faith, who drove Karena home that morning, and when they pulled in, Faith's car was in the lot. Marisol took that to mean she was asleep.

In the car, she said, Karena was emotional. She thought Faith was probably upset with her for getting so drunk. Marisol told the jury why the night had hit Karena so hard: she had not eaten, she had been drinking, and she was going through something painful in her own life. Karena talked about an abusive former partner who had once lived in that apartment. "Her partner at one point, like, lived there and just kind of like tore up the place," Marisol said, and being there "retriggered a lot for her." That was why she didn't want to stay that night. The State was giving the jury a reason for the 4 a.m. exit that has nothing to do with Faith, and it was a believable one.

Then she told the jury what they found. They called out for Faith, thinking she had overslept, and then they saw the blood. Faith was partly wrapped in a comforter, half off the bed, between the bed and a desk. Marisol froze. Karena got her phone unlocked first, so it was Karena's call the jury had just heard. When the operator asked them to find a pulse, Marisol couldn't do it, so Karena did. Marisol noticed a tampon near the bed, and she told the jury why it stuck with her: "Faith is not a dirty person."

And then she said something nobody had told the jury before. Later that day, after the two of them had been taken to sit with counselors and were brought back to the apartment, by then a crime scene, she saw him there: Karena's ex-partner. She told officers he could not be there, because Karena "had like a restraining order against him."

She did not say his name, and the prosecutor did not ask it. Put it beside Day 1, when Karena told the jury about a restraining order against her former boyfriend. He is not charged with anything, he has not testified, and nothing in the record suggests he had anything to do with Faith's death. I am not suggesting it either. But the question this raises is about the investigation, and it sits squarely on the record: the State's own witness told the jury that the man Karena had a restraining order against came to the scene the day Faith was found. Did police take his name down that day? Did they look at him and clear him? If they did, the jury should hear that. It is one of the cleanest ways to take a question off the table, and right now it is just sitting there.

She and Karena don't talk anymore. She tried for a long time, she said, and then it became too much. She doesn't talk about Faith much, because what she sees when she does is the room, and she would rather everyone else keep their picture of Faith as she was. She did not know the defendant and never heard either woman mention a Miguel. The defense asked her nothing.

The first man through the door

Officer Michael Castro has been with the Chapel Hill police for 22 years and is a school resource officer now. In 2012 he was in the traffic unit. He answered the call for an unresponsive female. One officer was there ahead of him, Officer Ennis.

Where is Officer Ennis now? "He passed away about a month or two ago."

Let that sit for a second. The first officer into that apartment can never be asked what he saw, what he touched, or what Karena said to him downstairs. And there is no video to fill the gap. Was Castro issued a body-worn camera in 2012? "No, ma'am." So nobody is ever going to see that first entry, and nobody is ever going to hear from the first man who made it.

Castro and a second officer went up and cleared the apartment, meaning they checked it for anyone still inside. Did he touch anything? "Maybe a door handle to open up a closet door or something." There was no one else there. In the bedroom, Faith was "on the far side of the bed, kind of half on, half off." He saw "blood splatter on the walls behind her and over near the closet," and blood on the bed.

Here is the list the defense is quietly building without asking a single question. Before anyone processed that bedroom, the people inside it included Karena, on the 911 operator's instructions; Marisol, in the doorway; Officer Ennis, who has died; Castro and a second officer, clearing it; and then the four people on the walk-through. None of that is anyone's fault. All of it is the starting point for any argument about what that room can and cannot prove. The defense let Castro go without a question, the third witness in a row that afternoon. It is saving its fire.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 7, THE CALL AND THE FRIENDS The Friend Beside the Roommate During the 911 Call Testifies

The bedroom

After the afternoon break, the trial turned from the people who found Faith to the people who processed the room.

Tamika Price has been a forensic evidence technician with the Chapel Hill police for 14 years. When did she start? "July 24th, 2012." About six weeks before this case. Before that she did the same work for the Durham police. It was her day off when her lieutenant called her in. She rode over with the department's other evidence technician, Sheleathea Wright-Quick, and they arrived "about 1240."

She walked the jury through the protocol. First a walk-through, with Investigators Johnnie Britt and Nikki Wyatt, "staying on the direct path, following the pathway of the apartment, not touching anything, just getting a visual layout." Then Wright-Quick shot the video, Price took the photographs, and only after that did the numbered evidence markers go down and the collecting begin.

State's Exhibit 25, a flash drive holding the scene photographs and two videos, went into evidence without objection, and the lawyers went to the bench before anything was shown. The first video walked the outside: the building, the parking lot, the stairs, Faith's white Nissan Altima parked beside them, and from the top of the stairs, a picnic table with a grill down the hill. The prosecutor zoomed in on that picnic table and had Price name it, without saying why. If you read my Day 1 piece, you know why. The State promised a witness who will put a cookout at that table, near where Faith parked, from evening until about 5 the next morning.

Before the second video, the State told the judge it showed Faith's body. Judge Gregory, citing an order he made before trial, directed the media "not to broadcast the remainder of State's Exhibit 25." We follow that order, and I am not going to describe those images beyond what was said out loud in the room.

What I can tell you is what the State was doing with that video, because it showed in every follow-up question. At each item Price pointed out, the prosecutor asked whether it had been collected. A pen on the floor. Blood spatter on the wall behind the pillow. A pair of gray and blue boxer shorts. A blue Riesling wine bottle. A tampon on the floor. A white bag. And, tangled in the bedding, a shirt: "a black and white polka dot type crop top." Each one: collected.

Then twenty-two printed photographs, State's Exhibits 26 through 47, all accepted "for substantive purposes," meaning the jury can use them as evidence of what was in that room, with no defense objection. Exhibit 26 came under the same request to the media. In another, Price identified the white bag on the bed as "the white paper bag with the note written on it." The prosecutor did not ask what the note said and moved on. On Day 1, the State told the jury it believes the defendant wrote that note and left his DNA on that bag. Nobody read it on Day 2. Then Exhibits 27 and 28, the trash can by the bed and the red slushy-looking vomit inside it, the photograph I set beside the red smudge above.

There is one more thing in this stretch I want to put next to something from the morning. The order Rainsford read talks about a tube-top shirt found in the bedroom, said to have been worn by Karena. On the 2012 tape, Jordan McCrary described what she had on as a white top with a black stripe. The Thrill's video showed her at the door in a tube-style shirt. And what Price identified as collected from the bedding is a black and white polka-dot crop top. Are those the same garment? I don't know, and Day 2 did not say. It is a fair question for the investigators, and the jury deserves a straight answer to it, because it is one of the six facts the court let in.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 8, THE BEDROOM Judge Strikes CSI's Answer on How the Blood Spatter Got There

The answer the judge struck

The ruling of the day came on a photograph of the nightstand by the bed, where Price pointed out spots of blood. The prosecutor asked what she meant by blood spatter.

"This would demonstrate force when someone is being hit really hard and the blood just spattering up," she said.

The defense: "Objection, characterization. Move to strike."

The court: "Sustained at this point. Motion to strike, allowed at this point. As far as the characterization."

The prosecutor came back with the question she could answer. Was blood spatter something she was trained to look for, and did these red spots look like spatter to her? Yes, and yes. No objection.

After the jury left for the day, Judge Gregory explained himself on the record, and I want to give him real credit here, because this is exactly how it is supposed to work. He said he sustained the objection only on the characterization of how the blood spatter got there, because she has not been tendered as an expert, which means the State never asked the court to qualify her to give opinions in that field. "I only sustained the objection based on the characterization of how that blood splatter got there," he said. Her recognizing it as spatter was not the problem. "She testified it was blood splatter. That's fine." And if the State later tenders her as an expert, he said he would revisit it. The prosecutor agreed.

Here is why that matters in plain English. Saying "that is blood spatter" is an observation a trained technician can make from what she sees. Saying how hard someone was hit to make it is an opinion, and opinions about how blood got where it is belong to a qualified expert, tested in front of the jury on how she knows. A witness doesn't get to tell a jury how a beating happened without the qualifications to say it. The defense caught it, the judge got it right, and the jury was told to put the answer out of their minds.

Can a jury really do that? That is one of the oldest questions in criminal trials, and I don't think anybody fully believes the answer is yes. But the ruling was correct, and the explanation was clean. The question it leaves is for the State. Will it tender Price, or call a bloodstain analyst, to give the jury the opinion it just lost? If it does, that witness will be cross-examined on it. If it doesn't, the jury has the photographs and nobody qualified to tell them what they show.

Thirty-nine and forty

The afternoon ended in confusion over State's Exhibits 39 and 40, two photographs, one with a belt in the foreground and one without. The prosecutor could not match the picture on the screen to the number he had called. Price checked her own evidence stickers. As he tried to flip back, the laptop dropped out of the slideshow, and with a few minutes left in the day, the judge stopped. He did not want the jury going home confused about which exhibit was which, so they would fix it first thing Friday morning, in front of the jury. He sent them home a little early, to return at 9:30 on Friday, October 9.

That was the judge protecting the record. An appeals court has to be able to tell which photograph a witness was describing, and a mismatch between a description and an exhibit number makes a record unreliable. Rainsford said he had been tracking it by the time stamps in the corner of the photographs. Nobody was fighting about it.

Then, with the jury gone, the prosecutor apologized. While flipping back through 39 and 40, he said, he had "briefly showed an image that did depict Faith's dead body, inadvertently," and asked that the media not use it. The judge made that request under his earlier order, noting that this trial is streaming live.

None of that goes to guilt, and the judge handled it without drama. But I want to say this part plainly. That is a family watching. Faith's people sat through two days of this. The court ordered those images kept off the broadcast, the State slipped, and the State owned it right away. We follow those orders. We will not show any of it, on any video or any page we make.

And there is a fair question underneath, the same one this trial keeps coming back to. The State lost track of its own exhibit numbers in front of the jury, a few minutes after its own witness offered an opinion she was not qualified to give. Neither is a big deal by itself. Both go to the question the defense has been asking since its opening: were the people handling the evidence in this case handling it carefully?

Where Day 2 leaves the case

The jury has not ruled. The State carries the burden on every piece of this, and the man on trial is presumed innocent.

My honest read on Day 2: the State is ahead on what happened in that bedroom, and it has not started yet on who did it. It has a documented scene, every item in that video confirmed as collected, twenty-two photographs in evidence without objection, a 911 call that put the jury in the room, a doorman's video that fixed the time the women left the Thrill, and a run of friends who never heard of the defendant. That last part cuts both ways. It is what the State's stranger theory needs. It is also why the whole case rests on DNA the jury has not heard yet.

The defense lost nothing on Day 2. It cross-examined three of the eight witnesses, one of them with a single question, and spent the day doing the only thing the order lets it do: making the jury hold facts it cannot be given a theory for. The red smudge. The vomit explanation. The door-frame stain by where she sat. The tube top in the bedroom. And every one of those came in through the State's own witnesses.

These are the questions Day 3 and the days after it have to answer.

When Price's direct is finished, will the defense ask her about the bathroom door frame, who swabbed it, why that swab was never tested, and when it went missing?

Was the red mark on Karena's finger ever swabbed or tested? Was the area of McCrary's car that screened positive for blood ever confirmed, and what did it show?

Which shirt is the tube top in the order: the striped top McCrary described in 2012, the one on the Thrill's video, or the polka-dot crop top Price identified in the bedding?

Who chose what was cut from Jordan McCrary's 2012 interview before the jury saw it, and what was left out?

What did police do about Karena's ex-partner, the man Marisol Rangel said was at the scene under a restraining order, and will the jury hear that he was looked at and cleared?

Will the State tender Tamika Price, or call a bloodstain analyst, to give the opinion the court struck?

And when the first lab witness finally takes the stand, will the State's DNA explain every innocent source it has to account for, and still point at one man?

WATCH: DAY 2 NO BREAKS EDITION, EVERY WORD Day 2, No Breaks Edition: The Roommate Cross-Examined and the 911 Call

To judge Day 2 for yourself, the No Breaks Edition has every word with the recesses taken out. Watch the cross of Karena Rosario and then watch Jordan McCrary right after it, and decide for yourself what you think was on that finger. Every Part, every clip and every article on this trial is on the Faith Hedgepeth trial coverage page.

So I come back to the two questions I started with. What was on Karena Rosario's hand when she walked out that door? Her friend has said blood three times in fourteen years. She has said vomit, and the State's own photograph of the trash can backs her up on what she was sick into. And why did it take until 2026 for anybody to ask her about a bloodstain right where she was sitting? I didn't hear an answer to either one on Day 2. Faith Hedgepeth was nineteen, the protector, the goofy one who gave everybody big hugs, and her last words to a friend that night were "I love you." She deserved an investigation that asked every one of those questions in 2012. We'll be in that courtroom every day the jury sits, to see whether this trial finally does.