On September 7, 2012, a friend of Faith Hedgepeth (born September 26, 1992), an undergraduate student in her third year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), found her corpse in their apartment in Chapel Hill. The last time she was known for certain to be alive was much earlier that morning, when she went to bed after returning from a local nightclub with the roommate.
Police recovered considerable forensic evidence in the case. Hedgepeth had been beaten over the head with a blunt instrument, later found to be an empty liquor bottle. Evidence of semen and male DNA was present at the crime scene. Evidence has served to eliminate one likely suspect, a former boyfriend of her roommate who reportedly expressed anger and resentment toward Hedgepeth, even supposedly threatening to kill her if he could not reunite with her roommate. His DNA, however, did not match that left at the scene. A note left at the scene, suggesting the writer was jealous, is also believed to have been written by the killer; it was among a large group of documents released by police two years after the crime, following a court action brought by several local media outlets.
Four years after the killing, a Virginia DNA testing company prepared and released (at police's behest) an image showing what the suspect might look like based on his genetic phenotype. A voicemail possibly accidentally recorded by Hedgepeth may have captured some of the events that led to her death.
In September 2021, the Chapel Hill Police Department announced an arrest in the case. The suspect, not initially considered, had been linked to the case through DNA evidence after a drunken-driving arrest the month before.
Background Faith Hedgepeth was born in 1992 in Warren County. She was a member of the Haliwa-Saponi Native American tribe recognized by North Carolina, and Warren County is part of the tribe's traditional territory. Her parents divorced within a year of her birth, and she was raised by her mother, Connie, with help from an older sister, in Hollister and Warrenton. Connie Hedgepeth had named her second daughter Faith because she believed that was what she needed to raise a fourth child when she already had two sons, a daughter and a husband with a drug problem.
In high school, Hedgepeth was an honor student, a cheerleader and a member of many extracurricular clubs and organizations. Her academic performance earned her a Gates Millennium Scholarship to attend the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Faith hoped to be the first in her family to graduate from college. (Her father had attended UNC-CH as well, but he did not graduate.) She was considering further studies to become either a pediatrician or teacher.
After two years attending the university, she took a hiatus for the spring 2012 semester. She remained in the Chapel Hill area over the summer, living in an off-campus apartment at the Hawthorne at the View complex between Chapel Hill and Durham, on the line between Durham and Orange counties, during the month of August. She planned to move to another apartment after her financial aid for the fall semester was made available to her. She shared the apartment with Karena Rosario, with whom she had been friends since freshman year, and Rosario's boyfriend, Eriq Takoy Jones.
Jones and Rosario's relationship had been marked by domestic violence, and eventually she ended it. He moved out of the apartment, but in early July 2012, he attempted to break into the apartment twice, even after Rosario changed the locks. Hedgepeth eventually drove Rosario to court to get a protective order that required Jones to stay away from the apartment. Jones reportedly resented Hedgepeth's influence over his former girlfriend, and at one point reportedly threatened during a phone conversation with Hedgepeth to kill her if he could not restore his relationship with Rosario.
Homicide
The evening of September 6, 2012, a Thursday, began at 5:45 p.m. with Hedgepeth attending a sorority rush event for the campus chapter of Alpha Pi Omega, a historically Native American sorority she hoped to join. At 7:15 she left, saying she had to work on a paper she was writing about the history of her tribe. She and her roommate and friend Karena Rosario went to the university's Davis Library to study together at 8 p.m. Between 8:30 and 9 she exchanged texts with her father about the sorority.
Hedgepeth left Rosario there briefly and returned around 11:30, after which they returned to their apartment together, arriving there around midnight. A half-hour later they left again, heading for The Thrill, a nightclub in downtown Chapel Hill which admitted customers under the legal drinking age of 21 to dance. (The establishment has since gone out of business.) The two young women arrived at The Thrill around 12:40 a.m. Rosario told police later that, after almost an hour and a half of dancing, she suffered an upset stomach and wanted to leave. Security cameras at the club show her and Hedgepeth leaving at 2:06 a.m.; it is the last visual record of her presence anywhere before the killing.
By 3 a.m., Hedgepeth and Rosario had returned to their apartment. A woman who lived below the two and was awake watching television said that she heard three thumping noises, which she described as similar to a heavy bag being dropped or furniture being overturned, shortly afterward. Hedgepeth's Facebook page was also accessed around the same time.
At 3:40 a.m., a text was sent from Hedgepeth's phone to that of Brandon Edwards, a former boyfriend of Rosario, saying "Hey b. Can you come over here please. Rosario needs you more aha. You know. Please let her know you care." Three minutes later, another text was sent from Hedgepeth's phone to Edwards' with the single word "than," believed to be a correction for the "aha" in the previous text. That was the last evidence of activity from Hedgepeth's phone. At 4:16 a.m., Edwards sent a return text, asking who had sent the previous text.
Rosario's phone records show she was also trying to call Edwards around the same time. When he did not answer, she tried to call Jordan McCrary, a soccer player for their school. At 4:25 a.m., she left the apartment and entered McCrary's car. At that time, Rosario said later, she believed Hedgepeth was asleep in her room, and she left the apartment's door unlocked.
McCrary drove Rosario to the home of another acquaintance on West Longview Street in Chapel Hill. She put the time of her arrival there at around 4:30 a.m. After spending the rest of the night and the early morning there, a short time after 10:30 she began trying to arrange a ride home. After attempting to reach Hedgepeth, who did not answer, Rosario instead called another friend, Marisol Rangel, who came and took her back to her apartment.
When they arrived there, shortly before 11 a.m., they entered and called for Hedgepeth, who did not respond. In her bedroom, they found her bloodied body, wrapped in a quilt, partially nude. They immediately dialed 9-1-1 and informed police.
Investigation
Details of the investigation were not discussed publicly at first, a deviation from the Chapel Hill police's usual practice. The town obtained a court order sealing all records as they were collected. Police collected semen from the scene and used it to develop a DNA profile; it reportedly was consistent with male DNA found elsewhere in the apartment. The autopsy determined that Hedgepeth had died from blunt force trauma to the head, likely a result of being hit by an empty rum bottle in the apartment.
Jones seemed to be a very strong suspect from the beginning. Police learned of his history of domestic violence and his threat against Hedgepeth. They also found that the night before, around 6 p.m., he had texted an acquaintance asking for forgiveness "for what I am about to do" and then posted the same message on his Twitter feed. Three days later, he changed the banner on his Facebook page to read "Dear Lord, Forgive me for all of my sins and the sins I may commit today. Protect me from the girls who don't deserve me and the ones who wish me dead today."
Police sought a DNA sample from Jones, whom they considered a person of interest. After some initial resistance, he complied. His DNA did not match the sample from the apartment, and they excluded him as a suspect. DNA from Edwards and many other men whom police found had been at The Thrill during the same time as Rosario and Hedgepeth was also tested, with the same result.
Within days the university's board of trustees, the local Crime Stoppers chapter, the Haliwa-Saponi tribe, and the apartment complex had offered a combined $29,000 in reward money for information leading to an arrest. Police hoped the reward money would lead to a quick resolution of the case, as their resources were limited. In the 2008 murder of Eve Carson, who at the time was UNC-CH's undergraduate student body president, a $25,000 reward had led to the killers' arrest. Two months later, the office of Governor Bev Perdue added another $10,000 to the reward for Hedgepeth's killer.
Seal on case records
In November, The Daily Tar Heel, UNC-CH's student newspaper, petitioned the judge who had ordered the investigation records sealed to release an early search warrant in the case. Instead, the judge ordered it resealed for another 45 days. At that time, the Chapel Hill police had not even released Hedgepeth's cause of death, although her parents told the media that their daughter's death certificate said she had been beaten.
Police announced in January that the DNA from the scene had come back as belonging to a male. From the crime scene and other evidence the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had developed a profile of the man. They said it was likely that he had lived near Hedgepeth in the past, had expressed an interest in her and his behavior may have changed since the crime, including showing an unusual interest in the case. Notwithstanding this release of information, the town successfully petitioned the court to keep the warrants under seal, saying that phase of the investigation was still not complete; in May 2013 the court extended the seal another 60 days.
In September 2013, a year after the killing, Chapel Hill police formally requested the assistance of the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, which had provided some help earlier in the investigation, with the case. "We're working the case hard, and we've used all the possible resources," said Chief Chris Blue. However, he would not share any more information about the case.
Two months later, the Tar Heel noted that the Hedgepeth case remained open, along with the death case of David Shannon, a UNC-CH freshman whose body had been found on the grounds of a Carrboro cement plant the previous October 27 (while he had died from a fall, the autopsy found he was severely intoxicated, and the Carrboro police suspected hazing and believed there might be other students who could tell them more about the circumstances of Shannon's death). In Hedgepeth's case, there had been no new information about a possible suspect since January. Yet the case records remained under court-ordered seal.