The State Said There Was One Question. The Jury Asked for the Lab Reports

Faith Hedgepeth was 19. She was a UNC student who wanted to be a pediatrician, and on the morning of September 7, 2012, her roommate found her dead in the Chapel Hill apartment they shared. Fourteen years later, on Thursday, October 22, 2026, twelve people in a Durham County courtroom were handed the question of whether the State of North Carolina has proved that Miguel Enrique Salguero-Olivares broke into that apartment, raped and sexually assaulted her, and beat her to death.

The State told them there was really only one question. "Do you believe the forensic evidence in this case? DNA and fingerprints? Those are two totally separate things. One or the other would be enough. We have both."

At about five o'clock that afternoon, after two hours of deliberation, the jury sent a note out of the jury room. It was signed by the foreperson and dated that day, and it asked for one thing: "Could we have the latent print and DNA lab report summaries that were accepted into evidence?"

So the jury went exactly where the State pointed it. Whether that is good news for the State, nobody outside that room knows, and I am not going to pretend to. What the note does tell you is that after a full day of argument about red herrings and tunnel vision, the twelve people who decide this case went back to the paper.

That is Day 11. Two prosecutors argued for about two hours. Two defense lawyers argued for about an hour, and they had the last word. The judge read the law for about thirty-four minutes. The jury went out at 2:58. It asked for the lab reports near five, was sent home, and comes back Friday at 9:30. There is no verdict.

Miguel Salguero-Olivares has pleaded not guilty. He did not testify, and the judge told the jury his silence cannot influence their decision in any way. He is presumed innocent, and nothing here is a finding. It is what was said in open court on Day 11, what I think it means for each charge, and the questions it leaves. If you missed Wednesday, here is Day 10, when the defense rested without calling a witness and kept the last word.

The four charges, element by element

Before the arguments, the frame, because this is where the whole day lives. This jury is not being asked who killed Faith Hedgepeth. It is being asked whether the State has proved four charges against this man, each one element by element, beyond a reasonable doubt. The judge said it to them in plain words on Thursday afternoon: the State "has the burden of proving the identity of the defendant as the perpetrator of the crimes charged beyond a reasonable doubt." Identity is the threshold for every count. Then the counts.

First-degree rape. The State has to prove vaginal intercourse, "penetration, however slight," by force, against Faith's will and without her consent, and that the defendant either employed a dangerous or deadly weapon or inflicted serious personal injury. The verdict is guilty or not guilty. There is no lesser option on this count.

First-degree sexual offense. The same structure, and the judge defined the sexual act in this case as anal intercourse only. Guilty or not guilty, no lesser option.

First-degree burglary. A breaking and entering of an occupied home, at night, without consent, by someone who at the moment he went in intended to commit first-degree murder, first-degree rape or first-degree sexual offense inside. Guilty or not guilty, no lesser option.

Murder, the count with roads. First-degree on premeditation and deliberation: an unlawful killing, with malice and intent to kill, thought about beforehand, however briefly, in a cool state of mind. Or under the felony murder rule: a killing with a deadly weapon while committing first-degree rape or first-degree sexual offense. Or both. If neither, second-degree murder: malice without premeditation and deliberation. Or not guilty.

Hold onto one thing. Burglary is charged, but it is not one of the felonies that can carry felony murder; the judge named only rape and sexual offense. The State's second prosecutor said it out loud: "If there's no rape and there's no sex offense, then there's no felony murder." That sentence is the hinge of this case.

The morning, before the jury came in

Court came back in session at 9:43 with the jury out. Judge Keith O. Gregory asked both sides about the final jury instructions. The State said "the change we discussed" had been "correctly made" and it had no further issues. The defense had nothing to add. Both sides looked at the verdict sheet. The State had no concerns, and the defense said it had no objection to the sheet's form.

Then James Rainsford, the lead defense lawyer, renewed an objection he had made at the charge conference the day before. He objected to felony murder going to the jury as a theory at all, under the federal Constitution and the due process clause of the North Carolina Constitution, because, he said, "it creates an ambiguity" and "a potential issue of jury unanimity." And he objected to the verdict sheet "not having itemized the particular felony that the jury would have to select for the felony murder rule." His point: if this jury convicts on felony murder, nobody will know whether it was based on the rape or the sexual offense, and "we would have no way of knowing, especially if one charge was dismissed."

The judge: "So noted and respectfully that objection is noted but denied." He said he had given the lawyers a blog post on the case law he considered on point.

Most people watching will never think about those three minutes again. I think they may matter as much as anything said all day. Every North Carolina verdict has to be unanimous, twelve out of twelve. The defense is saying a single box marked "felony murder" lets six jurors get there through the rape and six through the sexual offense and still look unanimous on paper. And when felony murder is the only basis for a murder conviction, the underlying felony is generally folded into the murder for sentencing. If the sheet doesn't say which felony, nobody can say which one folds in, or whether the murder verdict survives if one of those convictions is ever thrown out.

If the jury convicts on both sexual counts, or finds premeditation alongside felony murder, none of that matters much. If the verdicts come back mixed, it matters a great deal, and the defense has it preserved. The judge relied on a decision I have not read, so I am not naming it and can't tell you whether he got it right. The objection is on the record twice, which is what a lawyer is supposed to do with a point like this.

"Screaming his name"

The jury came in. The judge gave them the instruction every jury gets before closings: the arguments of the lawyers "are not evidence." A lawyer may not become abusive, inject personal experiences, express a personal belief about whether the evidence is true or false, or argue things outside the record. And if the jurors' memory of the evidence differs from the lawyers', their memory controls.

Then he asked, "Will there be a closing argument from the State of North Carolina?" and Angela Garcia-Lamarca, a senior assistant district attorney, stood up.

She started with Faith and with loss. "It seems possible that there is no worse agony for a human to experience than the loss of their child." Then she gave the jury the line the State would build two hours around. "The forensic evidence in this case is screaming the truth. The forensic evidence is screaming his name."

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 43 Faith Hedgepeth Murder Trial: Prosecutor Says Forensic Evidence Is 'Screaming His Name' / Pt 43

Within the first few minutes she reached the question this case has never answered. Why. And she handled it in a way I think the defense should have stood up on, and did not.

"The only person who knows why they ever commit a crime is the person who committed the crime. And they don't have to tell us, and that's right, that's good. We need constitutional protection. And we have it, and he had it. But you know what? Faith didn't have any protection that night. Constitutional or otherwise."

Read that with the room in mind. The man at the defense table had chosen, the day before, not to testify, and the State may not comment on that choice, directly or by an argument a jury would naturally take as one. She did not say he failed to testify. But a juror looking from the prosecutor to the defendant as she says "and he had it" can hear that sentence two ways: a respectful nod to a right, or a reminder that this particular man used it.

She came back to the same idea twice more before her half was done. Explaining felony murder, she said the order of events did not matter, and "the only person who knows for sure is him. He's the only one other person who was there who survived." Finishing, she said: "Tell him. Stop him. Tell him what he already knows. He has known for 14 years."

No objection to any of it. Not one, in two hours of State argument. I'll get to what that means.

"He was the jury, he was the judge, and he was the executioner," she told them. "He sentenced her to death. He sentenced everybody else who loved her to life." Then: "There was no one there to stop him. Until now. You can stop him."

Breaking, nighttime, and a door left unlocked

The State walked the jury through the charges in the order of its boards, starting with burglary, and this is the count I think the State argued most from inference.

On breaking, Ms. Garcia-Lamarca read the jury the law: "The mere pushing or pulling open of an unlocked door, even in the slightest degree, constitutes a breaking." Then she applied it. "Because he walked in. That's breaking and entering. She left the door unlocked. He didn't have to break anything. He just walked in. And that's why there's no sign of forced entry."

That definition is right. Opening a closed but unlocked door is a breaking in North Carolina; walking through a door already standing open is not. So the element turns on whether the door was closed when Karena Rosario, Faith's roommate, left that morning. I have not found the line in our record where anyone says it was shut, and the State did not cite one on Thursday. A jury can use common sense. But "he just walked in" fits a closed door and an open one, and a breaking is an element the State has to prove, not assume.

On nighttime, she gave them the definition, too dark to see a face without artificial light, then the timeline: Ms. Rosario left around 4:25 a.m., the cookout across the way broke up between 3 and 5, and "Faith's body was already cold" when her roommate touched her at about 11. That is a lawyer's inference from a cold body, not a pathologist's time of death. Legally it can be enough. But of the burglary elements, nighttime rests on the thinnest material, and a nighttime entry is what makes it first-degree.

The motive the State admitted it cannot prove

Then came the passage I think is the most exposed thing the State said all day.

The State has never offered evidence of why this happened. Ms. Garcia-Lamarca said so. And then she offered a theory anyway. "The State can offer you a theory based on the evidence." The cookout group across the parking lot, "people we know to have been associates of his, if not family." He "approaches them, whether by himself or with someone else." Then: "It's not a leap to suggest" that Faith shut him down. "He's angry and embarrassed and humiliated." He "starts messing with the gas tank on the car. We know that thing was open and nobody can explain it."

And then, in the same breath: "You don't have to believe any of that. That is what the evidence suggests. You don't have to believe that to know that he's guilty."

Some steps in that story are in the record: the cookout, women at Faith's apartment being approached by men, Faith protecting her friends, the open gas cap, the prints and DNA on the bottles. The step I could not find, anywhere in our record of eleven days, is any evidence that this defendant approached Faith or was rebuffed by her. "Not a leap to suggest" is the tell. North Carolina lets a lawyer argue any conclusion drawn from the evidence. It does not let a lawyer argue from matters outside the record, and a story whose central event is not in the evidence sits right on that line.

She tied the note to it later. The State's theory is that the defendant wrote the note on the food bag, the one that says "I'm not stupid," and that it shows motive. "He was angry. He put that in the note. I'm not stupid. This happened because he felt stupid." Then, again: "Maybe. We can't know for sure. And it doesn't matter."

Here is what bothers me. Both prosecutors called the motive story a maybe. By the end of the State's argument it had stopped being one: Faith's life had been dissected in that courtroom "because of this man's selfish actions. Because he couldn't be made to feel stupid." The theory the jury was told it need not believe, stated as fact, with no objection.

Motive is not an element of any charge, and the State was entitled to say so. But then it did not need a story whose key step is not in the evidence. The prosecution's job is to prove what it charged, not to fill the gaps with a narrative and hope the jury can't tell which parts were testified to.

"One or the other would be enough"

The DNA is the State's case, and Ms. Garcia-Lamarca put it to the jury in the numbers the lab gave.

On the sexual offense, the likelihood ratio when the defendant is included: "170 septillion." On rape: "114 septillion." On the Bacardi bottle the State calls the weapon: "Her blood, his skin," and another astronomical figure. She explained the ratio as a seesaw comparing two explanations, and she kept to that language. That matters. A likelihood ratio is not the chance that he did it, or even the chance that he is the source. It compares two hypotheses about one sample.

WATCH THE CLIP Faith Hedgepeth Murder Trial: State Tells Jurors DNA or Fingerprints Alone Would Be Enough

She also took on, head first, a theory the defense had raised but never offered evidence for: that the DNA came from an earlier consensual encounter. Her answer was the tampon. His semen was inside Faith's body, but none was found on the absorbent part of her tampon. "There's no evidence of that, but we know that's not even possible. Because if that had happened, then there would be semen on the absorbent part of her tampon." Later: "Which means he pulled the tampon out first."

That is an inference from a lab result. Whether the State's scientist testified that an earlier encounter would necessarily leave semen there is something I am still checking against Days 7 and 8. "Not even possible" may be stronger than the witness was.

On force, she argued the lack of genital injuries "is consistent with his having beaten her into unconsciousness before he penetrated her. There's no other explanation for it." On the weapon: "We know the Bacardi bottle was a deadly weapon because he used it to bludgeon her to death."

Notice the chain. The weapon element on both sexual counts rides on the bottle. The bottle being a deadly weapon rides on the beating. The beating being his rides on identity. And force rides on the injuries being explained by a beating first. Circumstantial evidence carries the same weight as direct evidence, and the judge told the jury so. But each link is its own inference, and the jury has to accept every one.

"That equals malice," and the judge's correction

Then the State reached premeditated murder, and Ms. Garcia-Lamarca said something the judge would quietly fix three hours later.

"The intentional use of a deadly weapon itself gives rise to a presumption that the act was undertaken with malice. You can presume that if somebody went in and committed a murder with a deadly weapon, that there was malice. They used a deadly weapon. That equals malice. That's what the court said."

The rule, as I understand it, is not "equals." The jury MAY infer malice from the intentional use of a deadly weapon causing death. It does not have to, and the State keeps the burden the whole way. When Judge Gregory read the law that afternoon, he used the right words, twice: "you may infer... that it was done with malice, but you're not compelled to do so."

So the jury got the correct law from the judge. But nobody objected, and the jury heard the wrong version first, in a prosecutor's voice, with "that's what the court said" attached. In an identity case malice is barely contested, so I don't think this one changes a verdict. I raise it because it is the pattern of the day: the State overstated, the defense sat, and the judge's instruction cleaned up after both of them.

She ended her half on the line the jury would carry back with it. "There's really just one question that y'all need to answer, and that is do you believe the forensic evidence in this case?" And: "If you don't, then you have to find him not guilty and let him walk out the door with you." And: "You're the conscience of this community. You decide on behalf of the people of Durham and North Carolina what we will and will not tolerate in the apartments where our children are sleeping."

That last sentence leans toward asking a jury to convict to protect the community, which is a classic closing-argument objection. "Let him walk out the door with you" invokes what happens if they acquit. Neither drew an objection. The court took a recess at about 10:32 while the second prosecutor's equipment was set up.

Red herrings, and the promises the defense did not keep

Lisa Coltrain, the special prosecutor, opened the State's second argument at about 10:44 by admitting something about the rules. "The defense gets a chance to argue to you last. And so we kind of have to anticipate what they might tell you."

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 44 Faith Hedgepeth Murder Trial: Prosecutor Calls Roommate Theory the 'Biggest Red Herring' / Pt 44

She framed it with "a little lawyer trick." Red herrings. "When a lawyer doesn't want you to focus on something really important... Don't focus on all these lab reports. Focus on the red herrings. Because if you focus on these, he's guilty."

Hold that sentence next to the jury's note. The State told this jury, in plain words, that the lab reports were the thing the defense did not want them to look at. Five hours later, the lab reports were the only thing the jury asked for.

Then she went through the defense's opening statement, promise by promise. "You're going to hear from Joy Barker, the downstairs neighbor. Did y'all hear from her? Nope." "They said you're gonna hear from a UNC professor. Did y'all hear a UNC professor? Nope." "They told you you're gonna hear from several of the defendant's girlfriends. Did you hear from one of them?" And: "He doesn't have to put on evidence. But he can. Told you he was gonna put on evidence. Didn't because it's noise."

WATCH THE CLIP Faith Hedgepeth Murder Trial: Prosecutor Says the Defense Promised Witnesses Jurors Never Heard

That is the price of resting without a witness. The State may point out unkept promises in a defense opening as long as it never touches the defendant's own silence, and she said the right words about the burden. I think it was fair, and I think it landed.

One piece went further than it should have. On Joy Barker, the downstairs neighbor whose report of thumps came in through officers, Ms. Coltrain told the jury why the State did not call her: "She wasn't going to add anything other than she heard some thumping around from some drunk college girls coming home." Joy Barker never testified. What she would have added is not evidence, and the judge's own instruction that morning told the lawyers not to argue outside the record.

"Faith had a type"

Then came the sentence from Thursday most likely to be quoted back in an appeal, if there is ever a conviction.

Ms. Coltrain was answering the defense's "make them prove it" challenge from opening: prove that Faith and this man ever knew each other. "Challenge accepted," she said, and ran through it. Six witnesses who knew Faith had never heard of him. "Absolutely no digital overlap" on the phones. Then: "Faith didn't speak Spanish. We know he was taking English classes."

And then: "Every guy that could be tracked down that Faith was somehow involved with was an African American man. Doesn't mean people can't date outside their type, but Faith had a type," and, she told the jury, he was not it.

To be fair to the State, the argument is about consent. If Faith never knew this man and never would have chosen him, the earlier-encounter theory gets weaker, and the six witnesses and the phone records are real evidence for that.

But it did not need that sentence, which asks a jury to infer something about a sexual encounter from a man's race and ethnicity. Arguments inviting a jury to decide anything on racial grounds are among the most disfavored a prosecutor can make, under the federal Constitution and North Carolina's. And if no witness testified that every man Faith dated was African American, the sentence is also outside the record.

And nobody objected. I think that was a mistake, and I'm saying so because this channel names a defense lawyer who isn't pushing the same way it names a prosecutor who overreaches. An objection costs almost nothing. It forces a ruling, gives the judge the chance to tell the jury to disregard it, and preserves the issue in its strongest form. Without one, an appeals court looks only for gross impropriety, an error so extreme the judge should have stepped in on his own. The defense answered it later, in its own argument. Answering is not objecting.

"Then how, sir, is your sperm inside her vagina?"

The strongest passage of the State's whole day was the one built entirely on evidence.

Ms. Coltrain played part of the 2021 interview, recorded when investigators approached the defendant. Asked if he had sex with Faith: "No. Never." She read from the call to his mother on the day of his arrest, from the State's translation: "Mom, I don't know the woman. I haven't ever seen her in my life ever." She read from something he wrote two and a half years later: "I never set one foot there."

Then she turned to the defense table. "He said over and over and over again he did not know her. He never had sex with her. Then how, sir, is your sperm inside her vagina?"

Those denials are the hardest thing in this record for the defense. If the DNA is right, they are false, and any consent theory has to live alongside a man who said he never touched her. The defense has to pick a lane, and on Thursday it picked one.

One flag on the delivery: "then how, sir?" is a question put to a man who has chosen not to answer questions. The State would say it was aimed at his recorded denial, which is evidence. The judge's instruction that afternoon, that his silence "is not to influence your decision in any way," is the protection, and it was given.

The roommate, the order, and a line both sides walked

Next, the State took on the defense's doubt before the defense could raise it. "If it wasn't him, they gotta blame it on somebody. You know who they've been insinuating the whole time. Karina."

Here you need to know about a ruling this jury has never heard described. Before trial, Judge Gregory granted a State motion barring the defense from arguing that Karena Rosario, Faith's roommate and best friend, committed this crime. She is not charged with anything, and nothing in this article suggests she was involved. The judge did let the defense put a short list of facts before the jury: a red spot on her hand as a friend described it, a presumptive blood stain in that friend's car and on the bathroom door frame, where her tube top was found, the thumps the downstairs neighbor heard, and the open gas cap. The defense may use those facts to attack the investigation. It may not use them to say she did it.

So the State spent close to forty minutes taking those permitted facts one at a time and offering innocent explanations. The door-frame stain, swabbed, lost and never tested: "We don't lose anything by not having this. Whatever it is, doesn't take his sperm out of Faith's body." The red spot: she had told officers it came from a drink. "If she had been drinking a blue slushie, it wouldn't have never been an issue." The car: a presumptive test and no DNA profile.

Then the grown-men line. "Ladies and gentlemen, we have grown men judging the actions of drunk, emotional teenage girls." And: "Karina's not on trial. Karina is a victim of this circumstance."

I think this was the State's shrewdest choice of the day. It defined the defense's doubt as "blaming Karena," which the defense is forbidden to embrace. That's legitimate; both sides can argue the permitted facts. But notice who benefits when one side may name the theory and the other may not defend it.

"His DNA was there because he was there"

Ms. Coltrain's answer to the attacks on the 2012 investigation was the best single sentence the State had on handling. "Every officer in the Chapel Hill Police Department could have gone into that crime scene, rolled around on the carpet, spit on the Bacardi bottle. It ain't gonna magically make his DNA appear. His DNA was there because he was there."

WATCH: SHORT Faith Hedgepeth Murder Trial: Prosecutor Answers the Planted-DNA Theory With "Is It Reasonable? No."

She's right that other people's DNA cannot create a match to one specific person. That answers contamination. It does not answer how his DNA got onto certain items, or what the lab's own processing did. "Perfect investigation does not exist," she said, and the gaps "do not negate the evidence that was found." That answers "you missed things" better than it answers "you mishandled what you found."

Two record points from this stretch I think the jury deserved straighter.

First, she called the Bacardi bottle "this murder weapon with his DNA on it." By the lab's figures as I have them, he was a minor contributor on the cap, about four percent, and excluded from the interpretable profiles on the neck and body. She acknowledged the four percent later, "because Faith is bleeding all over it," a fair explanation of a small share. "His DNA on the murder weapon" without the rest is broader than the record.

Second, on whether the vaginal and rectal swabs were packaged together, she asked, "Did you hear any evidence of that?" Questions are not evidence, true. But it was the State's own analyst on Day 7 who said those swabs "are packaged together" and that it "usually gets tested together." That question understates what this jury heard.

None of this touches the core of the State's case, his sperm in her body and his denial. But closing is for arguing the record, all of it, and here the State's phrasing ran a step ahead of its own lab.

"Reasonable doubt is reasonable"

Near the end, Ms. Coltrain told the jury what the standard is. "Reasonable doubt, which is the standard that we're held to. No more and no less. We want you to hold us to that burden. But reasonable doubt is reasonable. Not conspiracies, not what's salacious. Not what's clickworthy. Not what gets somebody to buy a paper."

She called it "this media frenzy, this defense throwing anything they can at the wall to see what sticks." Then the hypotheticals: is it possible the roommate was "some kind of CIA level operative"? "Is it possible? Sure." "Maybe aliens came down." Is it reasonable? No. As someone who is part of that media, I'll say the press is not on trial, and publicity is outside the record. The "possible, sure" examples land hard anyway, because the defense offered no alternative explanation for the sperm.

And here is the half of the standard the State left out. When the judge defined reasonable doubt that afternoon, he said it is a doubt "arising out of some or all of the evidence that has been presented or lack or insufficiency of the evidence." A doubt can come from what the State did not prove. "Not what's clickworthy" is true. So is "lack or insufficiency of the evidence." The defense would spend its hour on that second half.

The note, the handwriting, and a do-it-yourself comparison

The note on the white food bag, the one that reads "I'm not stupid, jealous bitch," has been the weakest leg of the State's case since Day 9, when the State's own SBI agent withdrew his handwriting comparison on one exhibit after it came out that the writing was an image from the internet. No expert ever compared the bag to this defendant's writing.

So Ms. Coltrain asked the jury to do it. She read them the law: "a well-settled evidentiary principle that a jury may compare a known sample of a person's handwriting with the handwriting on a contested document without the aid of either expert or lay testimony." Then she put his known writing next to the note and walked them through it. "Ooh, all caps. We got something there." "All the same size." "Those E's are weird and they are distinctive."

North Carolina's evidence rules do let a jury compare authenticated handwriting itself, so this was lawful. But a trained agent's comparison fell apart on cross, and the State's answer was not a better expert. It was twelve lay people, block capitals, and "those E's are weird." And the prosecutor herself said it "doesn't make any more sense for him to have written it, Karina to have written it, anybody," and "maybe he was leaving it to throw people off his trail. I don't know."

I think that's the honest version of the note: nobody knows what it means. If it matters to any element, it matters to identity, and on identity the State has much stronger evidence than a guess about E's.

"Put the guilt where it belongs"

The State's last minutes were about Faith and the people around her, and they were powerful. Faith's life "has had to be dissected for you." Her friends and family ""have had to pay and pay and pay and pay," carrying guilt over what they could have done. "Why couldn't I have just locked the door?" Officers asking what they could have done to solve it sooner.

"All these people have racked themselves with guilt when the guilt lays right here with this man. It's been here since September 7th. It remains here now." Then the three counts, one at a time: the evidence "is loud, it is clear, and it is shouting at you" that he sexually assaulted her, that he raped her, that he murdered her. "Put the guilt where it belongs. Find him guilty."

WATCH THE CLIP Faith Hedgepeth Murder Trial: Prosecutor Tells Jurors to Put the Guilt Where It Belongs

That ending carried the sentence I raised earlier, laying the trial's intrusions at his feet "because of this man's selfish actions." Read one way, it blames the crime. Read another, it blames a man for making the State prove its case, which is his constitutional right. I think a careful prosecutor leaves it out.

The State's two hours, in sum. The core was strong and grounded: the DNA in her body, his prints on the Riesling bottle, his flat denials, no link between them in anyone's memory or phone, and an answer to every permitted fact about the roommate. The soft spots, all unobjected: a motive story whose central event is not in evidence, ending stated as fact; "Faith had a type"; the passages on what only he knows; "that equals malice"; the media remarks; and the cost of the trial laid at his feet.

The defense did not object to a single word of it. The judge recessed for lunch at about 12:09.

"Tunnel vision"

When court came back at 1:19, the judge asked, "Will there be a closing argument from the defense?" and Mr. Murphy, Mr. Rainsford's co-counsel, stood up first.

"I want to talk about tunnel vision. Tunnel vision by the State from the beginning of this case until the day that we stand here right now."

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 45 Faith Hedgepeth Murder Trial: Defense Tells Jurors the State Had 'Tunnel Vision' / Pt 45

He answered the race passage the way the defense chose to answer it: by turning it back on the investigation. In 2012, he said, the defendant was a teenage boy. "This wasn't some 45-year-old drifter. Oh, but he's Guatemalan. So he was probably across the street" at the cookout, "getting drunk and catcalling." That casts the State's whole motive story as an assumption about who a Guatemalan teenager must be.

Then he said out loud the theory the defense had circled for eleven days without a witness behind it. "Why wouldn't he sometimes have an intimate encounter with somebody, maybe even on a one time basis, and not tell anybody else about it?" He pointed to the State's own nurse examiner, who testified sperm can be found up to five days after intercourse, even during menstruation, and to what the lab called a rare amount of sperm. And about the denials: "He was here. And he didn't remember."

I have to hold the defense to the record the same way. The persistence figures are in evidence. "He didn't remember" is not. In the 2021 interview and the jail call he did not say he forgot; he said he never knew her and never had sex with her. A jury that accepts an innocent encounter has to accept that he lied about it or forgot it, and the defense chose "forgot" with nothing in the record saying so. It is the weakest point in the defense's argument, and it sits right on top of the State's strongest fact.

Here is what that theory does to the charges. If the jury thinks the DNA could have come from an encounter days earlier, rape and sexual offense are in trouble, because both need force and lack of consent. And by the State's own words, no rape and no sexual offense means no felony murder. What the theory does not touch, by itself, is premeditated murder or burglary.

"Excluded"

Mr. Murphy's best minutes were about a single word.

He put the State's exhibit of the Bacardi bottle on the screen and showed the jury where, on that bottle, the defendant's share was found, on the very top of the cap, and where it was not. "They didn't tell you about all the other places that were swabbed for DNA on the bottle in which Miguel was excluded." On the tampon, the lab found male DNA on the string. "Because if they said Miguel, they would have had to say in that same sentence, excluded." And on the absorbent part of the tampon, he said, the lab ran only a presumptive test, not a microscope.

"You didn't hear the words excluded during the State's closing that I heard."

That point comes entirely from the State's own witnesses and lab reports, and it is squarely fair. It is also the point that connects to the jury's note. The State said the lab reports were what the defense didn't want them to look at. The defense said the lab reports contain a word the State never said. The jury asked for the lab reports.

He also raised transfer. The white bag, the cap and the boxer shorts were all on or near the bed. "Did they test the sheets? DNA transfers. It doesn't have to be contamination." There was no expert testimony in this trial on transfer from bedding. It's a common-sense argument, and the jury decides its weight.

Then he finished with "monster" against "just a boy." "You've got to assume that Miguel is a monster" who couldn't have had an encounter with Faith, he said, pointing to a jail video call in evidence in which the defendant talks with a friend. "And this is the tunnel vision."

WATCH THE CLIP Faith Hedgepeth Murder Trial: Defense Says Miguel Was 'Just a Boy' Not an 'Angry Monster'

Using the permitted facts about the red spot on the roommate's hand, Mr. Murphy in two sentences went past what I think the court's order lets the defense argue. I won't repeat them; an uncharged person should not travel with them. The State did not object or ask the judge to say anything, and with the defense arguing last, it had no other chance to answer.

"That is not my job"

James Rainsford took the rest of the defense's time, about forty-seven minutes. He started where the defense has to start. "They said there's a burden in this case, hold us to our burden. We have to prove beyond reasonable doubt all elements of this case. And if we don't do it, you have to come back not guilty." That is the law, and the judge would say almost exactly the same words an hour later.

His case was the investigation. He asked why the roommate's lost memory was understandable while a man shown an iPhone screen nine years later was expected to know at once. "Why is there a double standard?" And he drew a distinction I think only partly works: "I don't know this person is not the same thing as we've never known each other." That fits the moment investigators showed him a photograph. It fits the jail call to his mother much less well, and the defense did not take that call on.

He went after the cookout nobody could put the defendant at: "Who ran that down?" He hammered the phones and computers: what were the search terms, who did the examinations, and the one image the State took from a computer turned out to be a meme. "A little bit of a lack of confidence in the State's vetting of its own evidence." And he answered the State's English-class theory with the note itself: someone who "learned just enough English to write a note and spell jealous correctly and use a contraction."

Then he turned the State's handwriting invitation around. On Day 9 he had asked the State's agent whether comparing handwriting without the right training is dangerous. The agent said "Absolutely." "It's dangerous to do, according to Agent Heinrich, but now the jury's got the case. We're asking you to do it." He also noted the State could have hired a handwriting expert and didn't.

WATCH: SHORT Faith Hedgepeth Murder Trial: Defense Says Comparing Handwriting Without an Expert Is Dangerous

This is where the State finally stood up. When Mr. Rainsford began telling the jury what a crime scene reconstruction expert could conclude from the photographs, the State objected, "not in evidence," and he pulled back to the record. When he talked about the light being turned off, the State objected again, and as we hear it the judge overruled. The first objections by either side in any closing Thursday.

Then the scene. "So this is your crime scene." A pillow with a cell phone on it, across Faith's waist. The comforter pulled over her. Pillows covering blood on the wall. The trash can and the things on the bedside table not knocked over. "The comforter over the top sounds empathetic," he said. "Why does somebody put pillows to cover up blood that's on the wall?"

I think the comforter argument was the most original thing the defense said all day. A scene that looks covered rather than ransacked is hard to square with the rage the State described. The State's answer, given in advance, was its own narrative of the attack. The defense's argument goes to the jury with no reply.

Promises, owned

Mr. Rainsford did something I want to give him credit for. He met the State's broken-promise attack head on.

On the UNC biology professor from the defense opening: "I was going to call a biology professor from UNC because I thought we were going to have a fight about that. We didn't. We had an agreement about that." The fight he meant was over how long sperm persists, and the State's own nurse had given the five-day testimony the defense wanted.

On Joy Barker: "You're right. We didn't call Joy Barker as the defense. I didn't keep my end of the bargain." Then he told the jury Joy Barker "had no motive," and the State objected, and the judge sustained it. Fair enough. Joy Barker never testified. Telling the jury she had no motive to lie vouches for a witness they never saw, which is the mirror of what the State did that morning when it told them what she "wasn't going to add."

Owning the promise was the better course. But "we had an agreement" describes something this jury never saw. No stipulation on persistence was read to them in our record, and a lawyer may not tell a jury about facts not in evidence. The State did not object.

"Ten yellow placards, only five were tested"

The heart of the defense's last word was what the State did not test and could not account for.

"I saw ten yellow placards. Only five were tested."

WATCH THE CLIP Faith Hedgepeth Murder Trial: Defense Asks Jurors Why Only 5 of 10 Pieces of Evidence Were Tested

The blood in the bathroom: "It got lost and was never tested." "This is biological evidence. It is gone. Through no fault of his." The front doorknob and light switch, never swabbed: "A stranger came in. How hard is that to do?" How many officers were inside before the evidence technicians, "a closely guarded secret." The State's own slide calling the spot on the roommate's hand "red stuff": "They would own it. They would say it's blood." And: "Some people call it a red herring. Other people might call it reasonable doubt."

He took on the DNA numbers as statistics. He called the way such numbers can be misheard "the prosecutor's fallacy": "That's not what those numbers mean. They're running hypotheticals on whether or not it might be somebody's DNA." He asked why the lab did not use population subgroups. He noted that one sample went "from a mixture to a single source" with not much explanation. "If the courtroom gets ahead of the science, then we have a problem."

The fallacy point is right as statistics, but in my view it does not reach the State's main claim, which is identity; the State argued the crime itself from the injuries and the scene. The subgroup and single-source points ask non-scientists to distrust huge numbers on grounds no defense scientist took the stand to explain. That's the cost of resting without a witness.

He said the sentence the whole defense rests on. "And that is not my job. We are not here to prove anything. We are here to test the State's evidence."

That is the law. The defendant has no burden. Not to explain the DNA, not to name another person, not to prove anything. It is also the most important sentence a juror can carry into that room, and the hardest one to hold onto when the State has just put 170 septillion on a screen.

In this hour too, the defense went close to the court's line about the roommate in a few sentences, about the sink, the gas cap, and clothes. The State objected three times, never on that ground. Arguing last has a price for the other side, and Thursday the State paid part of it in silence.

What the defense never directly answered was the prints. His left palm and thumb on the Riesling bottle, in her apartment. Transfer can explain a bag, a cap and boxer shorts on a bed. It does not explain a palm print on a bottle, and I did not hear a word about it.

He finished on reasonable doubt, reading the same definition the judge was about to read. Then, to the jury: "If you take nothing else away from this defense argument, please take that away. They have not proved their case. Hold them to their burden."

"Thank you, Mr. Rainsford," the judge said. It was 2:20.

The law, read aloud

There was no break. The judge went straight into the charge. "Ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to read the law to you. You don't have to take notes because you will each get an individual copy of the law. I simply want you to listen."

That's worth noticing. The plan I heard at Wednesday's charge conference was for the jurors to listen rather than read. On Thursday each of the twelve took a copy back with the verdict packet. For a charge with two roads to first-degree murder and a felony murder rule built on two felonies, I think that's the right call.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 46 Faith Hedgepeth Murder Trial: Jury Begins Deliberating After Judge Explains Felony Murder / Pt 46

He began with the burden, in the words this channel exists for. "The defendant is not required to prove the defendant's innocence. The defendant is presumed to be innocent. The State must prove to you that the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. A reasonable doubt is a doubt based on reason and common sense, arising out of some or all of the evidence that has been presented, or lack or insufficiency of the evidence, as the case may be. Proof beyond a reasonable doubt is proof that fully satisfies or entirely convinces you of the defendant's guilt."

Then the defendant's silence. "The defendant in this case has not testified. The law gives the defendant this privilege. This decision not to testify creates no presumption against the defendant. Therefore, the silence of the defendant is not to influence your decision in any way." That is the instruction the defense asked for, and it is the jury's guide to every "only he knows" and "then how, sir" from the morning.

Circumstantial evidence carries the same weight as direct. The State must prove identity. An expert's opinion should be considered, "but you're not bound by it." And one most viewers will skip: a witness's earlier statement, used to test their testimony, is not "evidence of the truth of what was said at that earlier time because it was not made under oath at this trial." Both sides read from 2012 and 2013 statements Thursday as if they proved what they said.

Then the charges, and the judge's words settled several questions this trial has carried for days.

On murder: "It is your duty to return one of the following verdicts. One, guilty of first-degree murder. Two, guilty of second-degree murder, or three, not guilty." First-degree could be found "either on the basis of malice, premeditation, and deliberation, or under the first-degree felony murder rule, or both." Felony murder "is the killing of a human being in the perpetration of rape or sexual offense." Burglary, as I said at the top, is not on that list.

On malice, the correction: "You may infer... that it was done with malice, but you're not compelled to do so."

On the sexual counts: penetration "however slight," the actual emission of semen "is not necessary," and first-degree requires a dangerous weapon or object, or serious personal injury. The felony murder element adds that the defendant "killed the alleged victim with a deadly weapon." On rape, on sexual offense and on burglary, the only verdicts are guilty or not guilty.

And he said "alleged victim," every time it came up, as the defense asked on Wednesday.

What the charge left out

What the judge did not say matters as much, and I want to be careful here because the charge conference happened mostly off our recordings.

As we heard the charge, there was no instruction on lost evidence. That is the instruction that can tell a jury it may infer that evidence the State lost, here the bathroom door-frame swab, would have been unfavorable to the State. So Mr. Rainsford's whole argument about the lost blood goes to the jury as argument only, with nothing from the judge telling them what they may do with it.

There was also no instruction on a defendant's false or contradictory statements, the one that tells a jury it may consider a false statement as showing consciousness of guilt, but not as enough by itself. So the State's "he lied" theme also goes to the jury as argument only.

No instruction on handwriting comparison either, so the jury got the State's invitation and the defense's warning and no guidance from the court.

When the charge was over and the jury was out, the judge asked both sides if they had "any concerns about anything I've said thus far." The State: "No, sir." Mr. Rainsford: no.

I don't know whether the defense requested a lost-evidence instruction at the conference and was refused, or never asked. Our record can't say. A party generally can't complain on appeal about an instruction unless it objected before the jury went out, though a refused request is usually treated as preserved. If the defense never asked, the lost bathroom blood, the strongest piece of its investigation case, went to the jury with no instruction behind it. Either way, "no concerns" is a moment I want explained.

The alternates were set aside. The judge explained that, under a change in North Carolina law that took effect December 1, 2020, he could not release them yet; if a juror is lost during deliberations, an alternate steps in and the jury starts over from the beginning. A foreperson was chosen. At 2:58 the jury went out.

"If we get to 5 o'clock," the judge told them, "I will bring you back out and send you home and bring you back tomorrow morning at 9:30."

The note

The courtroom went to ease at about 3:12. At about 3:35 the jurors were brought back in briefly to be handed the verdict packet and sent back again. Then the waiting.

Our main feed of the courtroom ended at about 4:22 in the afternoon. What follows comes from the CBS 17 broadcast of the same courtroom, which kept running.

Just before five, the judge came back on the record. "It's almost five o'clock. However, I do believe we have a question." He read it to the lawyers with the jury still out. "Could we have the latent print and DNA lab report summaries that were accepted into evidence?"

He asked which exhibits those were. The State listed them: State's Exhibits 106, 107, 109, 112, 117, 122, 130, 133, 134, 135 and 138. Mr. Rainsford spoke up: State's 101 and 102 were lab reports too. The State checked and agreed.

The judge asked each side's position. The State was "happy to send it back to the deliberation room." Mr. Rainsford: "I don't object when the jury wants to see evidence, Your Honor." The judge explained that under North Carolina law both sides have to consent before an exhibit can go back into the jury room. Both did.

Then the jury came in. The judge asked juror number eleven, the foreperson, whether the jury had reached a verdict. "No." He read the note into the record as Court's Exhibit 3, signed by the foreperson and dated October 22, 2026. And he told them: "Tomorrow morning those exhibits will be made available. I'm going to allow for you to take those exhibits back with you into the jury room. With the caveat that you cannot write on the exhibits, you cannot alter the exhibits in any way. You can't bend or fold the paper."

WATCH THE CLIP Faith Hedgepeth Murder Trial: No Verdict Yet as Jury Asks for the DNA and Fingerprint Reports

He reminded them not to talk about the case or deliberate overnight, even with each other. And at a little after five, they went home.

What the note can and cannot tell you

People are going to read a lot into that note. I'm going to read a little, and I'll tell you where the reading stops.

What the note shows is where the deliberation went in its first two hours. Not to the roommate. Not to the cookout or the gas cap. Not to the note on the bag, or the handwriting. Not to the 2021 interview, or the jail calls, or the motive. To the latent prints and the DNA. Those are the two things Ms. Garcia-Lamarca told them were each "enough" on their own. They are also the two things the defense says the State described without the word "excluded."

What the note does not show is which way any juror leans. Here's my read, and it is only my opinion. I think this jury is doing what it was asked to do, going to the evidence instead of the noise, the word both sides kept using about each other. I think the reports help the State on identity, because the numbers from her body are enormous and no defense scientist contested them. And the same reports hold the defense's best record: the exclusions on the Bacardi bottle, the four percent on the cap, the male DNA on the tampon string that was not his. Whether those exclusions raise a reasonable doubt about identity, or only about the bottle, is the question I would want answered in that room.

Where each charge stands, in my view

This is where I take a position, count by count, because that is what we do here. It is my opinion. The jury's is the one that counts, and it hasn't spoken yet.

Identity, the threshold for everything: I think this is the State's strongest ground by a wide margin. Sperm in her body with ratios in the septillions. His palm and thumb on a bottle in her apartment. His own flat denials. No defense scientist. The handling attacks are real and come from the State's own witnesses, but they go mostly to the items around the bed, not the samples from her body, and the prints were never met.

First-degree rape and first-degree sexual offense: this is the real contest, and where the State's proof rests most on inference. Penetration is strongly supported. Force and lack of consent are argued from the injuries, the tampon, the absence of any relationship, and his denials. The encounter theory has a foothold in the State's own persistence testimony but has to live alongside a man who said he never touched her. If I were a juror, these two counts are where I would spend my time.

Felony murder: it rises or falls on those two counts. The State said so itself.

First-degree murder on premeditation and deliberation: if the jury finds identity, the repeated blows to a sleeping person are about as strong a pattern for this as the law recognizes. The defense's comforter argument goes to the State's rage story, not really to premeditation.

First-degree burglary: I think this is the count the State argued with the least direct support. A breaking that depends on a door no witness I can find said was closed. A nighttime inferred from a cold body and a cookout's hours. An intent at the moment of entry inferred from what happened after. Each of those can be enough under the law. Together, they are the thinnest set of elements in the case.

What Thursday says about the process

Faith Hedgepeth was 19. Her friends and family have waited fourteen years, and the State is right that they have paid for every one of them. Nothing in this article takes anything from that.

The man at the defense table is entitled to a process that holds the State to every element it charged, however terrible the crime. On Thursday that process mostly held, and it held because of the judge. He corrected the State on malice, gave the no-testimony instruction, said "alleged victim," sent the law into the jury room in writing, and answered the jury's note the way the statute requires.

It held less well in the arguments. The State reached past its record on motive, the bottle, the swabs, the media, and once on race, and the defense let two hours go without one objection. The defense reached past its record on memory and on an agreement the jury never saw, went near a line the court had drawn, and the State let that go. Arguments are not evidence, the judge told them. Thursday showed why.

Friday at 9:30

The jury comes back Friday, October 23, at 9:30 in the morning. Before the jurors go back in, the clerk and the lawyers have to confirm the right exhibits. Then the verdict packet and the lab reports go back to the jury room together, under the judge's instruction not to write on them.

Watch for another note. A question about the felony murder rule, or whether they must agree on rape or sexual offense, goes straight to the defense's morning objection. A question about the lost swab goes to the instruction they never got. A request to rehear testimony, or see the jail video call, tells you which witness is in the room with them.

And watch for the verdict, count by count. If it comes, the shape of it matters as much as the words. Guilty on felony murder alone, with one sexual count not guilty, is the exact shape the defense preserved its objection for. A finding of premeditation makes most of that go away. Not guilty on both sexual counts takes felony murder down with them.

Whatever comes back, it's a verdict, not justice. Justice is whether the process that reached it was fair, and on Day 11 most of that process was in the jury's hands, with the lab reports and the law in writing, exactly where it belongs.

Every Part, every clip and every article on this trial is on the Faith Hedgepeth trial coverage page. If you want to hear the arguments the jury heard, watch Parts 43 through 46 in order, and then decide for yourself whether the State proved each charge.